I think it would be more accurate to say that the military is still the leader in DEVELOPING such technology, while the porn industry is the leader of finding innovative uses for such technology.
At best, one could say the (German) military played a role in moving magnetic recording out of the lab -- I'm not sure if the Danish inventor of magnetic recording was military-motivated. But the military's role in developing new recording media ended decades ago. CDs, DVDs, Flash Memory were developed by consumer electronics makers and not for military needs.
I'm not even sure that one could say that the military developed that much of the net. They certainly contributed a bunch of money to it (for which I thank them). And the whole route-around-damage feature is definitely military in origin. But I suspect that a truly military-developed internet would not be fragile to the array of viruses, DDoS attacks, DNS fragility, spoofing, smurfing, etc. that the current net seems prone to (At least I hope not).
My premise is that the military has ceased to the the driver of innovation that it once was and that it lost its leadership in the early 90s. Once technology became inexpensive and widely adopted, consumer and business applications outstripped military applications as the driver for innovation and development in the world.
P.S. Love your sig -- hope this reply does not taunt the "happy fun ball";)
The military may use old technology now, but at the time those machines are designed for the military they are the highest of high-tech.
You raise some very good points. I think the change-over from military applications being the leader to being the follower occured on the last 10-15 years. In the mid-80s the DoD adopted a COTS (Commmercial Off The Shelf) strategy to help reduce systems costs. Bad press about $600 toilet seats and $2000 screwdrivers made them shift from custom-designing and building everything to buying off the shelf.
I remember studying the synthetic aperture radar system for the F-15. It had a 500 MFlop-equivalent processor for doing FFTs and came out in the mid-60s -- definitely way past the leading edge. Then I noticed that the F-22, being designed in the 90s was only going to use a 20MHz i860. At the time, commerical CPUs were pushing past 100 MHz and the F-22 wasn't even first flown until 1997 and won't be in routine service until 2005. Now I'm sure they've upgraded the avionics for faster CPUs but I'd bet that when it enters service it will be at least 2 to 4 doublings behind commerically-available hardware.
Looking at current IT, I'd say that the military has contributed little to the most recent advancements in CPU and communications (how much of does Intel get from govt contracts vs. commercial sales? How about Cisco? or Nokia?). I'm sure the government buys lots of stuff from these vendors, but I'd also bet that its a minority of these company's business volumes and strategic concerns. Intel & Cisco design their new products for the commercial market, not the military market these days.
Yes, the military played a huge role in getting tech off the ground in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But somewhere in the late 80s and 90s, commerical applications became the driving force in tech. The DoD's move to COTS and the mass-adoption of tech in everyday life has put the military in the backseat on mainstream tech development.
Well, it's simple to spec a PC 2 years in advance. It becomes remarkably more difficult to spec what will be a high-end PC 2 years from now, though. Maybe that's what you meant?
Very good point, high-end machines are the hardest. But even the low-end is tough. Yes, you can easily say that 2 years from now you can get a 3 Ghz Pentium with 512 MB RAM, but you will have a devil of a time pinning down the price to put on the government's bid form (RAM prices don't always go down and Intel's pricing is a black art). You may also have problems with Microsoft as they may decide not to sell you an old version of their OS and the new version of their OS may not run on hardware speced 2 years before.
This means that the adult entertainment industry and other fast-paced private industries have supplanted the military as a driver for leading-edge tech. The long procurement cycles for weapons and government programs mean that they use older tech. In fact, it is a real problem for vendors because the government wants specs on stuff to be delivered in 18-24 months (its hard to spec a PC 2 years in advance).
Although the military will always be the driver for some technologies, commerical enterprise, with its much faster innovation cycle time, seems to be taking over as the key driver for innovation.
Great, now spammers are going to create exploits for phones and PDAs as relays for their filth. I wonder how many e-mails a zombie Pocket PC can crank out before the the user sees a $10,000 for bandwidth usage? I guess the antivirus indusry will see a nice boost in revenues for AV for Blackberrys, Palms, PocketPCs, Symbian phones, etc.
Schools could make better use of their investment in computers by using open-source textbooks or a wiki-like curriculum content system. Seems like a bunch of teachers could put together a great set of tools (like these college calculus texts) and eliminate the cost of paper textbooks.
Re:Therac-25: Programmers' Assumptions
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Can Software Kill?
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· Score: 1
Excellent example! The Therac case is a real classic and highlights one of the common problems in programming -- the assumptions built into use cases. Too often, the creators of software assume that the user will progress through a preconceived set of steps. Variations from the programmer-assumed script often lead to corrupted states. Therac killed when the operators switched machine modes while the machine was in the middle of switching modes (yet the machien gave no indication of being left in an anomolous and danger state).
Although not lethal, this problem is why so many e-commerce sites suck. Hit the back button or try to change your order at the wrong point in the process and you garble the transaction. Most site creators assume that buyers will follow a linear script of actions (browse, ad-item, browse, add-item,...., checkout, fill-in shippng, hit OK) so that any attempt to go back or change something quickly puts the transaction outside the assumed use case.
Pictures like this evoke strong and polar opposite emotions in me. On the one hand I am excited to see such beautiful images. I can't help but think there is life out there somewhere in all those galaxies (OK, maybe those really deep field galaxies are still too young to have life).
On the other hand, I am deeply depressed by these pictures because I know (to many 9s of certainty) that I shall never be able to visit these places. Seeing these galaxies makes them seem close enough to touch. Yet they remain so unreachable. SIGH!
With no "fast forward" in games, players will have little choice but to be exposed to these product placements (other than avoiding/abandoning the game). I wonder if game makers will offer dual-versions of games -- an ad-free version for $99 and an add-supported version for $29? Given people's tendency to by the cheaper option, wonder which version will have the highest sales?
Having done everything from assembly language programing for embedded systems to UNIX CLI (Command Line Interface) to Macintosh, I find that CLI is distinctly inferior to GUI (Graphical User Interface) for all but a few tasks. I challenge CLI users to do any form of word processing from a shell prompt. Even the most hard-core of them will resort to vi or emacs which use a primitive pseudo-GUI (and yes you can create and I have used a pure CLI text editor, but it is extremely painful). I don't want to even think about trying to replicate Photoshop with a CLI.
CLI = Dialog? The article mentions the notion of CLI as a dialog. But this is a misleading metaphor because so many CLI commands create invisible effects. You tell the computer to do something and all that returns (in most cases) is a command prompt. At best its like teaching someone to to do a job while speaking through a door. You give a command to do something (e.g., move a file from directory to another) and then you have to give a command to see the results (ls).
Discoverability: GUIs also provides visibility on to the set of available commands and functions. By browsing through the menus (which are usually nicely organized), you can learn the functions of an application. In contrast, a CLI-only machines provides no obvious way to learn about commands that you did not know existed -- at best you can access an alphabet soup of cryptic vowelless cmmnd names and then access the man page on each command. Therefore, GUI applications tend to be self-documenting, CLI commands require that you first know of the existence of the command and then you must read the man pages (grepping the man pages sometimes works if you know the jargon for what you are looking for).
Undo command: Most well-behaved GUI applications further support user learning via experimentation by having an undo command (and a revert command). CLIs tend to be irrevocable with no possibility for undoing inadvertent damage by a novice user (short of reloading the entire machine from a backup). Its no wonder *nix people get upset at the thought of novices on computers. But this lack of an "undo" is the fault of *nix CLI (it could easily be remedied with automatic file version tracking and journalling).
GUI is the superset of a CLI: Some people complain that GUIs take too long and I agree with them. CLI does offer a faster interface for experienced users. Yet a good GUI offers keyboard shortcuts that let experienced users invoke commands from the keyboard. While it is easy to have a keyboard shortcut available and shown in a mouse-oriented graphical GUI menu, it is hard to have a graphical menu shortcut in a keyboard-oriented CLI. With a GUI that shows the shortcuts in the menus, the user can learn shortcuts as they use the machine. Thus, I would argue, a GUI is the superset of a CLI.
Direct Manipulation: And CLI's inferiority is not just a matter of the learning curve (although that is a big disadvantage of CLI). For some tasks, a direct-manipulation WYSIWYG GUI is vastly superior. I challenge *nix people to build a CLI-only version of Photoshop. This is more that a matter of ease-of-use it is a matter of creating a coordinated interface between a person and a machine. While CLI forces the user to preform a completely defined action (e.g., type in a command that turns pixel 100,103 in file x to RGB value 128,128,200), a GUI lets the user try something (select a paint brush tool from the toolbox, test it somewhere, undo, use the tool somewhere else, etc.)
Control Panels vs. Config Files: The article claims that modern GUI-driven OS have too many control panels ("To master modern GUIs, one must recall the operation, layout and relation to each other of hundreds, if not thousands, of such panels." Yet how is this same functionality attained in a CLI machine? Config files are the absolute worst because they offer no form of input checking or potential for embedded help. Most config f
Commodities have two key business properties. First, competition is based on price -- the efficient low-cost producer gets the business. Second, commodities are standardized so that the same commodity from two different sources can be interchangable.
With regard to price competition, OSS seems to have a big advantage. Free beats proprietary on price any day. The only interesting question is whether OSS software makers are more cost-efficient ($/line-of-code) at developing new software than are close-source vendors. Perhaps this will come down to a competition between developing -world OSS developers who work parttime for free for OSS versus developing-world developers who get paid a fraction of the labor rate, but work full-time for commerical software vendors.
With regard to standards, I fear that Microsoft has made itself the de facto standard inspite of all the open standards bodies. Even the web seems to be moving into the MS camp. Websites are developed to display well in Internet Explorer, streaming media is often only available in Media Player, everyone uses MS Office, and soon many might be forced to use MS trusted computing. I'm not sure how open standards can re-assert themselves to commodify the playing field in terms of non-MS-controlled "standards."
Software won't be a commodity as long as one player controls the standards because one player has monopoly marketshare and everyone neds to be compatiable with that standard.
The list would be more aceptable if both sides faced a limit on the number of entries. Any doctor submitting too many blacklist candidates is probably incompetent -- one has to wonder why they are being sued so often. And any patient getting too many blacklist submissions is probably a litigious scammer.
If both sides faced consequences for participating on the blacklist, both sides would be more careful about what they do.
One problem is the low power budget for human-powered systems. The average fit adult can only crank out about 75 W. (No specs on the power output of the average computer user). Even a athletic cyclist only puts out about 200W.
A cyclist should be able to power a laptop, but running much more than that would be difficult.
Makes life easier & harder for law enforcement
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ICQ Universe
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Although online social network technology makes it easier for law enfrocement to track people and find out who they are connected too, it also makes life harder for the law. These types of networks encourage large numbers of connections. While the subjects of an investigation might only call a dozen different people by phone, they might have hundreds of contacts in an online environment. Tracking down all these contacts, most of whom are innocuous, becomes a labor-intensive needle-in-a-haystack problem.
The more contacts people have, the harder it is to determine which contacts are the salient ones from the standpoint of investigation.
This will also happen in the U.S. and other developed contries as the cost of these robots drops below the labor cost of employing people. Manufactured goods continue to grow cheaper every day while labor continues to become more expensive. I'm sure that some people won't like the idea of being cared for by robots, but most people will take the cheaper option when they discover the high cost of hiring someone (or their long-term care insurance refuses to reimburse them for high-labor cost care).
And if the U.S. passes jobs protection laws like those in Europe, I bet that the trend toward replacing people will accelerate. Low interest rates also help this trend by making it cheap (per month) to own an expensive piece of capital equipment. Add to that the fact that robots won't steal from you, take sick days, or quit when they are tired of caring for crotchety old coots, and this trend is inevitable.
Aside from the horrible security implications of letting others compute on your machine, this seems like another ploy to extend MS marketshare and force people to upgrade.
Any bets on whether this scheme will mean that only 1 GHz Pentium (or better) machines with the latest Windows will be able to send email. Worse, as machines get faster, this email standard will have to increase the computing requirement for each email -- anyone with a machine more than a few years old will find sending an email becomes impossible. It's the ultimate enforced upgrade scheme using Moore's Law against people would don't want to upgrade. Yes, I can see why Bill wants this.
Paradox of Open yet Closed
on
Security Warrior
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· Score: 3, Informative
Computer security is almost an oxymoron in a networked environment. On the one hand we want to be connected to everyone and seamlessly share data, software, and functionality. And so we connect to large numbers of people, like the poeple we meet on/. and other forums.
On the other hand, we want to restrict access to all but a "trusted" few. Yet the tools for creating trust on the internet are poor or illusory.
Trust takes time to develop. Only after we have a breadth and depth of experience with the coutnerparty can we truely trust them. The existence of people willing to create a trusted persona over the months or years in order to gain black-hat access or run a scam is at odds with the natural speed of the internet were it only takes a few months to become a trusted veteran.
Trust also requires tokens of commitment -- the idea that each party has something to lose in the relationship. Unfortunately, most online venues lack this because it is too easy to abandon a troll/criminal persona and create a fresh persona.
I applaud the work of computer security professionals -- its an extremely hard job made harder by the conflicting demands on computer infrastructures and the mismatched timescales of trust and the internet.
I'm surprised there are not blog-rating/tracking services that watch this kind of phenomenon. One could even do side-by-sides of how different blogs reported/copied material on a given topic. Different blogs might become known for originality of new ideas, while others might become known for long-term insightful commentary on copies of other blogs.
Routine tracking of blatant, unacknowledged copying of other's blogs would certainly separate the poseurs from the thinkers. Tracking the provenence of ideas would also reduce the truth-by-repetition problem on the internet wherein an erroneous fact looks widely accepted due to mere duplication.
Gaming industry becomes like film industry?
on
Where Did the Games Go?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps the gaming industry will soon look like the film industry. There will be lots of releases from a range of game makers (from indies to EA) with a range of budgets -- some will be massively profitable, others will seem to sell well but not make up for their big budgets, others might sell poorly but be profitable for a small india game maker, and some will just suck. Games that do well will get sequels and mechandising tie-ins. Games that do poorly will dissappear or be relegated to second tier channels like the "free" games that might come with a console or the games you can buy for the price of shipping and handling from mail-order computer places.
Personally, I suspect that the game industry is maturing and diversifying into categories for different age groups and interests. The result will be lots of little hits (e.g., the best selling game for preteens) along with an occassional category-crossing megahit.
Its not a matter of how many releases are hits, but how many releases make enough money to pay back the development costs.
I would suspect that authorities can learn much about people and groups simply by mapping who talks with whom (using technques discussed hrer). Even if many of the subjects use anonymous SIM chips and phones, their patterns of calling create a map. And if anyone they call is a known party (e.g., know "terrorists" or their family members), then their anyonymity becomes compromised.
The authorities can probably even deduce leadership structures from the sequence of calls. If A calls B and then B immediately calls C, D, and E, we might suspect that B is a leader of a cell with D, E, and F as members. Add data on physical location (phone towers) and the authorities have even more data to map out a network and assess likely roles of unnamed people.
While I doubt that cars have reached this point, there will come a time when it makes economic sense to "weld the hood shut." Building a nice easy-open car hood does cost money. If a car were as reliable as most consumer electronics, there would be little reasons for most people to get inside the hood on a routine basis. Cars are n't there yet, but as engine reliability increases, there will be less reason to get under the hood and thus less reason to pay for all the parts and mechanisms needed to made a door on the front of the car.
When was the last time you needed get inside your car's radio? (OK, I know I posting on/. and someone hacker out their will have done something interesting inside their car radio)
The point is that if the cost of providing access exceeds the benefits of providing access, then you get products with "no user servicable parts inside."
This raises the possibilty that Novell will partner with some Chinese software firm in order to pass China's impending domestic software content laws. I'm sure that the Chinese government would give Novell a nice domestic content seal of approval if Novell brings some IP and perhaps $$$ to the Chinese table.
* The chip could serve as the brains inside a robot capable of vacuuming your house. While such appliances now exist, a vacuum using Hajimiri's chip as its brain would clean without constantly bumping into everything, have the sense to stay out of your way, and never suck up the family cat.
Not really. The radar might reflect off the cat or your leg, but would pass right through wooden furniture and walls. A radar-equipped vacuum cleaner would still bump into stuff.
* A chip the size of a thumbnail could be placed on the roof of your house, replacing the bulky satellite dish or the cable connections for your DSL. Your picture could be sharper, and your downloads lightning fast.
Wrong on size. Satellite dishes are big to both help collect enough RF energy to get a clean signal and to pinpoint on a single satellite. Without the needed collecting area and beam-forming span of the antenna, the signal would be weak and overlaid with signals from other satellites in orbit.
This same technology could be used for low-cost RFID scanners. If manufacturers can bundle an entire RFID interrogator on a silicon chip, it would reduce scanner costs and accelerate RFID adoption. The low power of this silicon-based GHz RF would be acceptable in many RFID scanning applications.
It may not be anything but a statistical anomoly. How we date and locate things has always fascinated me..... We look at the decay across 30 years and immediately say it must have a half life of 1.251 billion years? excuse me but thats a pretty small sample rate for my tastes.
I see your point and agree that using science to know the past is very tricky. In the case of measuring half-lives, the methods are statistically accurate because of the huge sample size in atoms. If you start with 6 x 10^23 atoms and time how long it takes a billion of them to decay, you get a very accurate estimate of the decay rate. That the experiment only watches the atoms for a billioth of a half-life is less important that the fact that it counts the activity of such a large sample size of atoms.
But the problem you are alluding to is deeper than that. Although we can be statistically confident that the half-life of K40 is 1.251 billion years currently, that measurement gives us no proof that it has always been 1.251 billion years. For that we need accurate measurements of half-life at two widely separated times (and as you say, we've only been doing that for a few decades).
IANAP, so perhaps some astrophysicist here can enlighten us on how we know that the laws of physics dont change. Based on the invariance of spectral lines, I suspect that we can be confident that the eletromagnetic force has been constant over time (even here I wonder if its possible to change the laws of physics to mimic a redshift). But how do we know that the weak force and strong force have remained constant over the life span of the universe? For example, is there a way to accurately measure the half-life of elements spawned by billion light-year distant supernovae?
Finally, it may be that changes in half-life over galatic timescales are irrelevant and long as all half-lives change by the same factor. A consistent shift in half-lives would mess up the numerical dates, but not disturb the order. Thus, we may know that the carbon is older than our solar system, but be off in our numerical estimate of the age of the solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it would be more accurate to say that the military is still the leader in DEVELOPING such technology, while the porn industry is the leader of finding innovative uses for such technology.
;)
Yes, the military was responsible for many previous inventions. See my other replay for why the military lost that lead in the 90s
The porn industry didn't invent the VCR or the net, they just figured out some awesome ways to use it.
I don't think that the military developed or drove the invention of the VCR . Video tape recording inventions were driven by broadcasters and consumer electronics. At least, I doubt that Japanese companies had the military in mind when JVC introduces VHS in 1976 in Japan and Sony invented Betamax.
At best, one could say the (German) military played a role in moving magnetic recording out of the lab -- I'm not sure if the Danish inventor of magnetic recording was military-motivated. But the military's role in developing new recording media ended decades ago. CDs, DVDs, Flash Memory were developed by consumer electronics makers and not for military needs.
I'm not even sure that one could say that the military developed that much of the net. They certainly contributed a bunch of money to it (for which I thank them). And the whole route-around-damage feature is definitely military in origin. But I suspect that a truly military-developed internet would not be fragile to the array of viruses, DDoS attacks, DNS fragility, spoofing, smurfing, etc. that the current net seems prone to (At least I hope not).
My premise is that the military has ceased to the the driver of innovation that it once was and that it lost its leadership in the early 90s. Once technology became inexpensive and widely adopted, consumer and business applications outstripped military applications as the driver for innovation and development in the world.
P.S. Love your sig -- hope this reply does not taunt the "happy fun ball"
The military may use old technology now, but at the time those machines are designed for the military they are the highest of high-tech.
You raise some very good points. I think the change-over from military applications being the leader to being the follower occured on the last 10-15 years. In the mid-80s the DoD adopted a COTS (Commmercial Off The Shelf) strategy to help reduce systems costs. Bad press about $600 toilet seats and $2000 screwdrivers made them shift from custom-designing and building everything to buying off the shelf.
I remember studying the synthetic aperture radar system for the F-15. It had a 500 MFlop-equivalent processor for doing FFTs and came out in the mid-60s -- definitely way past the leading edge. Then I noticed that the F-22, being designed in the 90s was only going to use a 20MHz i860. At the time, commerical CPUs were pushing past 100 MHz and the F-22 wasn't even first flown until 1997 and won't be in routine service until 2005. Now I'm sure they've upgraded the avionics for faster CPUs but I'd bet that when it enters service it will be at least 2 to 4 doublings behind commerically-available hardware.
Looking at current IT, I'd say that the military has contributed little to the most recent advancements in CPU and communications (how much of does Intel get from govt contracts vs. commercial sales? How about Cisco? or Nokia?). I'm sure the government buys lots of stuff from these vendors, but I'd also bet that its a minority of these company's business volumes and strategic concerns. Intel & Cisco design their new products for the commercial market, not the military market these days.
Yes, the military played a huge role in getting tech off the ground in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. But somewhere in the late 80s and 90s, commerical applications became the driving force in tech. The DoD's move to COTS and the mass-adoption of tech in everyday life has put the military in the backseat on mainstream tech development.
Well, it's simple to spec a PC 2 years in advance. It becomes remarkably more difficult to spec what will be a high-end PC 2 years from now, though. Maybe that's what you meant?
Very good point, high-end machines are the hardest. But even the low-end is tough. Yes, you can easily say that 2 years from now you can get a 3 Ghz Pentium with 512 MB RAM, but you will have a devil of a time pinning down the price to put on the government's bid form (RAM prices don't always go down and Intel's pricing is a black art). You may also have problems with Microsoft as they may decide not to sell you an old version of their OS and the new version of their OS may not run on hardware speced 2 years before.
This means that the adult entertainment industry and other fast-paced private industries have supplanted the military as a driver for leading-edge tech. The long procurement cycles for weapons and government programs mean that they use older tech. In fact, it is a real problem for vendors because the government wants specs on stuff to be delivered in 18-24 months (its hard to spec a PC 2 years in advance).
Although the military will always be the driver for some technologies, commerical enterprise, with its much faster innovation cycle time, seems to be taking over as the key driver for innovation.
Great, now spammers are going to create exploits for phones and PDAs as relays for their filth. I wonder how many e-mails a zombie Pocket PC can crank out before the the user sees a $10,000 for bandwidth usage? I guess the antivirus indusry will see a nice boost in revenues for AV for Blackberrys, Palms, PocketPCs, Symbian phones, etc.
Schools could make better use of their investment in computers by using open-source textbooks or a wiki-like curriculum content system. Seems like a bunch of teachers could put together a great set of tools (like these college calculus texts) and eliminate the cost of paper textbooks.
Excellent example! The Therac case is a real classic and highlights one of the common problems in programming -- the assumptions built into use cases. Too often, the creators of software assume that the user will progress through a preconceived set of steps. Variations from the programmer-assumed script often lead to corrupted states. Therac killed when the operators switched machine modes while the machine was in the middle of switching modes (yet the machien gave no indication of being left in an anomolous and danger state).
Although not lethal, this problem is why so many e-commerce sites suck. Hit the back button or try to change your order at the wrong point in the process and you garble the transaction. Most site creators assume that buyers will follow a linear script of actions (browse, ad-item, browse, add-item,...., checkout, fill-in shippng, hit OK) so that any attempt to go back or change something quickly puts the transaction outside the assumed use case.
Pictures like this evoke strong and polar opposite emotions in me. On the one hand I am excited to see such beautiful images. I can't help but think there is life out there somewhere in all those galaxies (OK, maybe those really deep field galaxies are still too young to have life).
On the other hand, I am deeply depressed by these pictures because I know (to many 9s of certainty) that I shall never be able to visit these places. Seeing these galaxies makes them seem close enough to touch. Yet they remain so unreachable. SIGH!
With the fall-off in TV ratings, it seems that ads will soon be creeping into computer games. This will include product placements in traditional games and free games that market products. I notice that EA already has a director of advertising sales.
With no "fast forward" in games, players will have little choice but to be exposed to these product placements (other than avoiding/abandoning the game). I wonder if game makers will offer dual-versions of games -- an ad-free version for $99 and an add-supported version for $29? Given people's tendency to by the cheaper option, wonder which version will have the highest sales?
Having done everything from assembly language programing for embedded systems to UNIX CLI (Command Line Interface) to Macintosh, I find that CLI is distinctly inferior to GUI (Graphical User Interface) for all but a few tasks. I challenge CLI users to do any form of word processing from a shell prompt. Even the most hard-core of them will resort to vi or emacs which use a primitive pseudo-GUI (and yes you can create and I have used a pure CLI text editor, but it is extremely painful). I don't want to even think about trying to replicate Photoshop with a CLI.
CLI = Dialog? The article mentions the notion of CLI as a dialog. But this is a misleading metaphor because so many CLI commands create invisible effects. You tell the computer to do something and all that returns (in most cases) is a command prompt. At best its like teaching someone to to do a job while speaking through a door. You give a command to do something (e.g., move a file from directory to another) and then you have to give a command to see the results (ls).
Discoverability: GUIs also provides visibility on to the set of available commands and functions. By browsing through the menus (which are usually nicely organized), you can learn the functions of an application. In contrast, a CLI-only machines provides no obvious way to learn about commands that you did not know existed -- at best you can access an alphabet soup of cryptic vowelless cmmnd names and then access the man page on each command. Therefore, GUI applications tend to be self-documenting, CLI commands require that you first know of the existence of the command and then you must read the man pages (grepping the man pages sometimes works if you know the jargon for what you are looking for).
Undo command: Most well-behaved GUI applications further support user learning via experimentation by having an undo command (and a revert command). CLIs tend to be irrevocable with no possibility for undoing inadvertent damage by a novice user (short of reloading the entire machine from a backup). Its no wonder *nix people get upset at the thought of novices on computers. But this lack of an "undo" is the fault of *nix CLI (it could easily be remedied with automatic file version tracking and journalling).
GUI is the superset of a CLI: Some people complain that GUIs take too long and I agree with them. CLI does offer a faster interface for experienced users. Yet a good GUI offers keyboard shortcuts that let experienced users invoke commands from the keyboard. While it is easy to have a keyboard shortcut available and shown in a mouse-oriented graphical GUI menu, it is hard to have a graphical menu shortcut in a keyboard-oriented CLI. With a GUI that shows the shortcuts in the menus, the user can learn shortcuts as they use the machine. Thus, I would argue, a GUI is the superset of a CLI.
Direct Manipulation: And CLI's inferiority is not just a matter of the learning curve (although that is a big disadvantage of CLI). For some tasks, a direct-manipulation WYSIWYG GUI is vastly superior. I challenge *nix people to build a CLI-only version of Photoshop. This is more that a matter of ease-of-use it is a matter of creating a coordinated interface between a person and a machine. While CLI forces the user to preform a completely defined action (e.g., type in a command that turns pixel 100,103 in file x to RGB value 128,128,200), a GUI lets the user try something (select a paint brush tool from the toolbox, test it somewhere, undo, use the tool somewhere else, etc.)
Control Panels vs. Config Files: The article claims that modern GUI-driven OS have too many control panels ("To master modern GUIs, one must recall the operation, layout and relation to each other of hundreds, if not thousands, of such panels." Yet how is this same functionality attained in a CLI machine? Config files are the absolute worst because they offer no form of input checking or potential for embedded help. Most config f
Commodities have two key business properties. First, competition is based on price -- the efficient low-cost producer gets the business. Second, commodities are standardized so that the same commodity from two different sources can be interchangable.
With regard to price competition, OSS seems to have a big advantage. Free beats proprietary on price any day. The only interesting question is whether OSS software makers are more cost-efficient ($/line-of-code) at developing new software than are close-source vendors. Perhaps this will come down to a competition between developing -world OSS developers who work parttime for free for OSS versus developing-world developers who get paid a fraction of the labor rate, but work full-time for commerical software vendors.
With regard to standards, I fear that Microsoft has made itself the de facto standard inspite of all the open standards bodies. Even the web seems to be moving into the MS camp. Websites are developed to display well in Internet Explorer, streaming media is often only available in Media Player, everyone uses MS Office, and soon many might be forced to use MS trusted computing. I'm not sure how open standards can re-assert themselves to commodify the playing field in terms of non-MS-controlled "standards."
Software won't be a commodity as long as one player controls the standards because one player has monopoly marketshare and everyone neds to be compatiable with that standard.
The list would be more aceptable if both sides faced a limit on the number of entries. Any doctor submitting too many blacklist candidates is probably incompetent -- one has to wonder why they are being sued so often. And any patient getting too many blacklist submissions is probably a litigious scammer.
If both sides faced consequences for participating on the blacklist, both sides would be more careful about what they do.
How about pedal-powered aircraft as the ultimate human-powered tech-toy?
One problem is the low power budget for human-powered systems. The average fit adult can only crank out about 75 W. (No specs on the power output of the average computer user). Even a athletic cyclist only puts out about 200W.
A cyclist should be able to power a laptop, but running much more than that would be difficult.
Although online social network technology makes it easier for law enfrocement to track people and find out who they are connected too, it also makes life harder for the law. These types of networks encourage large numbers of connections. While the subjects of an investigation might only call a dozen different people by phone, they might have hundreds of contacts in an online environment. Tracking down all these contacts, most of whom are innocuous, becomes a labor-intensive needle-in-a-haystack problem.
The more contacts people have, the harder it is to determine which contacts are the salient ones from the standpoint of investigation.
This will also happen in the U.S. and other developed contries as the cost of these robots drops below the labor cost of employing people. Manufactured goods continue to grow cheaper every day while labor continues to become more expensive. I'm sure that some people won't like the idea of being cared for by robots, but most people will take the cheaper option when they discover the high cost of hiring someone (or their long-term care insurance refuses to reimburse them for high-labor cost care).
And if the U.S. passes jobs protection laws like those in Europe, I bet that the trend toward replacing people will accelerate. Low interest rates also help this trend by making it cheap (per month) to own an expensive piece of capital equipment. Add to that the fact that robots won't steal from you, take sick days, or quit when they are tired of caring for crotchety old coots, and this trend is inevitable.
Aside from the horrible security implications of letting others compute on your machine, this seems like another ploy to extend MS marketshare and force people to upgrade.
Any bets on whether this scheme will mean that only 1 GHz Pentium (or better) machines with the latest Windows will be able to send email. Worse, as machines get faster, this email standard will have to increase the computing requirement for each email -- anyone with a machine more than a few years old will find sending an email becomes impossible. It's the ultimate enforced upgrade scheme using Moore's Law against people would don't want to upgrade. Yes, I can see why Bill wants this.
Computer security is almost an oxymoron in a networked environment. On the one hand we want to be connected to everyone and seamlessly share data, software, and functionality. And so we connect to large numbers of people, like the poeple we meet on /. and other forums.
On the other hand, we want to restrict access to all but a "trusted" few. Yet the tools for creating trust on the internet are poor or illusory.
Trust takes time to develop. Only after we have a breadth and depth of experience with the coutnerparty can we truely trust them. The existence of people willing to create a trusted persona over the months or years in order to gain black-hat access or run a scam is at odds with the natural speed of the internet were it only takes a few months to become a trusted veteran.
Trust also requires tokens of commitment -- the idea that each party has something to lose in the relationship. Unfortunately, most online venues lack this because it is too easy to abandon a troll/criminal persona and create a fresh persona.
I applaud the work of computer security professionals -- its an extremely hard job made harder by the conflicting demands on computer infrastructures and the mismatched timescales of trust and the internet.
I'm surprised there are not blog-rating/tracking services that watch this kind of phenomenon. One could even do side-by-sides of how different blogs reported/copied material on a given topic. Different blogs might become known for originality of new ideas, while others might become known for long-term insightful commentary on copies of other blogs.
Routine tracking of blatant, unacknowledged copying of other's blogs would certainly separate the poseurs from the thinkers. Tracking the provenence of ideas would also reduce the truth-by-repetition problem on the internet wherein an erroneous fact looks widely accepted due to mere duplication.
Perhaps the gaming industry will soon look like the film industry. There will be lots of releases from a range of game makers (from indies to EA) with a range of budgets -- some will be massively profitable, others will seem to sell well but not make up for their big budgets, others might sell poorly but be profitable for a small india game maker, and some will just suck. Games that do well will get sequels and mechandising tie-ins. Games that do poorly will dissappear or be relegated to second tier channels like the "free" games that might come with a console or the games you can buy for the price of shipping and handling from mail-order computer places.
Personally, I suspect that the game industry is maturing and diversifying into categories for different age groups and interests. The result will be lots of little hits (e.g., the best selling game for preteens) along with an occassional category-crossing megahit.
Its not a matter of how many releases are hits, but how many releases make enough money to pay back the development costs.
I would suspect that authorities can learn much about people and groups simply by mapping who talks with whom (using technques discussed hrer). Even if many of the subjects use anonymous SIM chips and phones, their patterns of calling create a map. And if anyone they call is a known party (e.g., know "terrorists" or their family members), then their anyonymity becomes compromised.
The authorities can probably even deduce leadership structures from the sequence of calls. If A calls B and then B immediately calls C, D, and E, we might suspect that B is a leader of a cell with D, E, and F as members. Add data on physical location (phone towers) and the authorities have even more data to map out a network and assess likely roles of unnamed people.
While I doubt that cars have reached this point, there will come a time when it makes economic sense to "weld the hood shut." Building a nice easy-open car hood does cost money. If a car were as reliable as most consumer electronics, there would be little reasons for most people to get inside the hood on a routine basis. Cars are n't there yet, but as engine reliability increases, there will be less reason to get under the hood and thus less reason to pay for all the parts and mechanisms needed to made a door on the front of the car.
/. and someone hacker out their will have done something interesting inside their car radio)
When was the last time you needed get inside your car's radio? (OK, I know I posting on
The point is that if the cost of providing access exceeds the benefits of providing access, then you get products with "no user servicable parts inside."
This raises the possibilty that Novell will partner with some Chinese software firm in order to pass China's impending domestic software content laws. I'm sure that the Chinese government would give Novell a nice domestic content seal of approval if Novell brings some IP and perhaps $$$ to the Chinese table.
* The chip could serve as the brains inside a robot capable of vacuuming your house. While such appliances now exist, a vacuum using Hajimiri's chip as its brain would clean without constantly bumping into everything, have the sense to stay out of your way, and never suck up the family cat.
Not really. The radar might reflect off the cat or your leg, but would pass right through wooden furniture and walls. A radar-equipped vacuum cleaner would still bump into stuff.
* A chip the size of a thumbnail could be placed on the roof of your house, replacing the bulky satellite dish or the cable connections for your DSL. Your picture could be sharper, and your downloads lightning fast.
Wrong on size. Satellite dishes are big to both help collect enough RF energy to get a clean signal and to pinpoint on a single satellite. Without the needed collecting area and beam-forming span of the antenna, the signal would be weak and overlaid with signals from other satellites in orbit.
This same technology could be used for low-cost RFID scanners. If manufacturers can bundle an entire RFID interrogator on a silicon chip, it would reduce scanner costs and accelerate RFID adoption. The low power of this silicon-based GHz RF would be acceptable in many RFID scanning applications.
It may not be anything but a statistical anomoly. How we date and locate things has always fascinated me. .... We look at the decay across 30 years and immediately say it must have a half life of 1.251 billion years? excuse me but thats a pretty small sample rate for my tastes.
I see your point and agree that using science to know the past is very tricky. In the case of measuring half-lives, the methods are statistically accurate because of the huge sample size in atoms. If you start with 6 x 10^23 atoms and time how long it takes a billion of them to decay, you get a very accurate estimate of the decay rate. That the experiment only watches the atoms for a billioth of a half-life is less important that the fact that it counts the activity of such a large sample size of atoms.
But the problem you are alluding to is deeper than that. Although we can be statistically confident that the half-life of K40 is 1.251 billion years currently, that measurement gives us no proof that it has always been 1.251 billion years. For that we need accurate measurements of half-life at two widely separated times (and as you say, we've only been doing that for a few decades).
IANAP, so perhaps some astrophysicist here can enlighten us on how we know that the laws of physics dont change. Based on the invariance of spectral lines, I suspect that we can be confident that the eletromagnetic force has been constant over time (even here I wonder if its possible to change the laws of physics to mimic a redshift). But how do we know that the weak force and strong force have remained constant over the life span of the universe? For example, is there a way to accurately measure the half-life of elements spawned by billion light-year distant supernovae?
Finally, it may be that changes in half-life over galatic timescales are irrelevant and long as all half-lives change by the same factor. A consistent shift in half-lives would mess up the numerical dates, but not disturb the order. Thus, we may know that the carbon is older than our solar system, but be off in our numerical estimate of the age of the solar system.