The original SOI was silicon on sapphire and was developed in the 60s for rad-hardened military chips and used by HP for workstation processors in the 70s and 80s. And yes, those AMD and IBM processors use SOI.
But if you're looking away from the sun, what stray light are you getting?
If you really start examining telescope optics, you find that many internal surfaces are "visible" to the detector. Light bouncing off of telescope structures, edges of apertures, and the rims of lenses all tend to get into the image. That is why the insides of optical systems are flat-black. The problem is that even the flattest, flat-black actually reflects some light (e.g., black velvet reflects 0.25% of light). Thus, a black object in full sun is much brighter than a magnitude 30 star. Also, any dust on the main mirror or defects in the mirror will scatter light into the optical path.
And if I hear one more person refer to the far side of the moon as the 'dark' side, I'm going to scream.
LOL! AGREED!!!
Re:Minor factual error: no "darkside" of the moon
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Compared to "our" side of the moon you won't have the earth hanging in the sky annoyingly
Yes, it does have some disadvantages, but not much. It is true that a nearside observatory would have the issue of Earthshine. This would definitely block a small part of the sky (nearly fixed from the moon's frame of reference, but moving in a galactic frame of reference). And you would probably need to add some features to the telescope design to reduce light scattering. But with no atmosphere to scatter the Earthshine, you would not have the level of light pollution that the moon currently imposes on Earth-bound astronomers.
The big ugly for moon-based optical astronomy would be the 15 days of sunlight that occur in most settings. The best options that I am aware of would put telescopes in craters at each of the moons poles. The crater walls would block sun and Earthshine and the environment would be delightfully chilly for easy use of low-noise detectors.
Minor factual error: no "darkside" of the moon
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 5, Informative
near-constant illuminated surface allow for massive energy and chemical manufacturing.......... Telescopes on the far side of the moon would give us a new view of the universe uninterrupted by light
The moon has a 29.5 day cycle meaning that places on the moon experience about 15 days of daylight and about 15 days of night. The far side of the moon gets just as much (and just as little) sunlight as the near side. Only radio telescopes would see a big advantage on the farside by using the moon to block the Earth's noisy radio chatter.
Its a minor point, but it does have implications for what you can do on the moon and the special engineering challenges of the environment (e.g., storing 15 days of solar power).
People would literally be betting on other peoples' lives; a rather morbid idea, don't you think?
It may seem morbid and morally repugnant, but its a trillion dollar industry that has been going on for hundreds of years. The entire life insurance industry (including annuities and death benefits) is all about betting on peoples lives. And liability insurance on big construction projects includes bets on the number of lives lost on the project -- the contractors often get a bonus if not too many lives are lost.
There is nothing wrong with buying and selling risk - many people are willing to buy certainty in an uncertain world. And what bigger uncertainty is there than the uncertainty of when someone will die?
The speed they're talking about is typically GBP (gain bandwidth product), or the frequency at which the gain of the transistor is 1. It's not typically useful at a gain of 1 (for instance, if you want to fan it out to like transistors, it'll need to be at least n for n fanouts).
Good point
Each pipeline stage must complete in a clock cycle. However, say there's a propagation of say, 10 transistors for the output at the end of that pipeline stage to be valid
Very informative. This implies that the GBP of the individual transistors must be sufficient to handle the product of the fanout and length. A single-layer stage with a fan-out of 3 would require 9 GHz transistors to support a 3 GHz clock speed. If the stage has a length of 10, then we would need 90 Ghz transistors to support both the fanout and the length with a 3 GHz clock. (Actually the transistors need to be faster than 90 GHz to make up for propagation delays in the circuit).
So what is the GBP for transistors in the latest, greatest CPUs?
I wonder when some site owner is going to get irate over a slashdotting? The slashdot effect demonstrates one of the core flaws of the internet -- the connectivity to each node vastly exceeds the scalability of each node. It is too easy for a single node to become the focus of an unsustainable level of traffic.
I wonder if there will ever be a ubiquitous opensource equivalent to Akamai's distributed caching system? Although it would be hard to do with dynamic content, static content could be automatically cached in transit. Requests for static web pages that are heading to a destination would be quickly compared to the reverse flow of pages that are in-cache. If the desired page is already there, the protocol would snarf a copy of the in-cache page instead of routing the request all the way to the destination server (actually, it might route the request, but flag it as "fulfilled").
Do any of the multicasting protocols handle this type of on-the-fly, mid-network rebroadcast from cache?
One core assumption of these types of trading markets is that the price of the item is tied to some objective value. In an ideas market, the price should reflect the probability that the stated idea or proposition will be true. Under this assumption, people could use the price of the idea as a proxy for the probability that the idea is true (and make product development or VC decisions with the information).
But some traders act not on the intrinsic value of the item underlying the tradable instrument, they act on the movement of the price. Thus they might buy in on a idea, not because it is undervalued, but because they think the price will go up. Such speculators profit from short-term trades. Called momentum trading, it is a good way to create a bubble in the price that has nothing to do with the true value of the idea or probability that the idea will come to pass.
Markets like this ideas market and the stock market tend to reflect both rational economic facts and human subjective thought patterns. The problem is that one can never tell when the price represents reality or a mass dillusion.
This isn't a FET like the transistors found in computers (and just about everything else). This is bi-polar technology that uses much more power than FET.
True, but there are technologies that combine CMOS and Bipolar for faster CPU designs (I think BiCMOS was more heavily used back in the 90s). Also IBM is working on mixed material, mixed technology that combines SiGe bipolar chips on a CMOS silicon-on-insulator wafer. You never know what those researchers will do next.
At 1 THz, it will take more than 40 clock cycles for a signal to move across a 1/2 inch die of the CPU. And it will take 320 clock cycles for a round-trip to a memory location just 2 inches away. (And that is assuming the signals travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, not the slower speed found in metal traces or optical fibers.) Should make it interesting for chip designers.
We, the consumers, have the right to take steps with our own property (telephones, computers, bandwidth we pay for) to stop practices that annoy us.
Yes, but there are implications attached to the exercise of those rights. If 5% of web users block ads, its no big deal. But if 95% of web users block ads (which will happen in a few years as people move to PCs with Norton 2004), the business models of a number of very valuable web resources go with it (I'm thinking of sites like/. and Google that derive much of their income from ad revenues).
Maybe Google will find an alternate model (subscription-access, ads comingled with search hits, or sell itself to Microsoft), maybe it won't. Personally, I don't think that any of these alternatives are better (for me and other Googlers) than the current ad-supported model. So if ubiquitous ad-blockering occurs, I will be saddened by the changes that it forces on sites like/. and Google.
What upsets me the most is that I see small ad-supported sites as the most likely victims of ad-blocking. Big sites will have the technical resources and marketshare to battle ad-blocking. Small sites won't and will see ad-revenues dwindle. Big retailers will win over small ones. People will turn-off ad-blocking when shopping at brand-name sites (like HP) and leave smaller sites that are also broken by ad-blocking. Therefore, ad-blocking will encourage the further consolidation of the web into a few big companies whose dominance ensures that they have the technical means or marketing might to circumvent ad-blocking.
Site owners are culpable in this mess, too. To judge by the virtiol expressed about ads in this thread, site owners have overstepped the bounds of civility with agressive advertizing tactics like pop-ups, pop-unders, and obnoxious ad graphics. Site owners have a right to put those ads on their site, but maybe site owners should not have exercised those rights.
Everyone has rights: consumers can block ads and site owners can put in more obnoxious ads. But too few people on both sides will take responsibility, or even think about, the changes wrought by the widespread exercise of those rights.
(BTW, for the record, I don't run an ad-supported site; I don't block online ads; I do click-through on some ads that interest me on some sites that I wish to support, I don't share files online; and I do skip over most, but not all, TV commericals.)
8. You can also ask for a password that is provided in one banner.
Good one, BlueYoshi. Some more:
9. create a content-for-clickthroughs model - veiwers that click-through gain access to more content (100 pageviews/clickthrough?).
10. outsource all staff to India to offset declining ad-revenue.
11. merge your content site with a retailer's site.
Please give me your website address so I can block it outright
Although we have owned our domain name for nearly a decade, We don't use the web as a customer interface, so there's nothing for you to block.
The bottom line is that whether you hate ads or not (and I hate ads almost as much as most people on/.) the ads do pay for a bunch of cool stuff on the internet. If the ad-supported model is killed off, I'm sure a bunch of interesting sites (like/.) will go with it. People would like information to be free, but salaries, servers, and bandwidth cost money.
You'll lose business though, and maybe someone needs to try it and go out of business in doing so; however they will have the satisfaction of having stopped freeloaders reading their precious content.
With ad-blocker's, an ad-supported content site owner has already lost the business, but not lost the cost of the freeloaders. When ad-blocking was rare, site owners could afford to ignore it. But if every new PC contains default-on ad-blocking, then they must respond.
Hmmm.... I wonder when/. will be forced to become ad-blocker-hostile or go subscription-only?
For instance, the past 3 years have seen markedly slower growth than Moore's law predicts
Interesting. Do you know why growth has slowed? Is it because of process barriers -- they can't make the feature size smaller? Or is it because of complexity barriers delaying design roll-outs -- designing chips with tens of millions of transistors is too hard? (I would doubt that competition has slackened much or that the effects of the dot-com crash would have hit Intel transistor count roadmap 3 years ago).
1. convert more content into images and host them offsite -- the site becomes unusable if external images are hidden
2. host ad images and scripts locally so they don't look like ad content
3. use a registration and login processes that do not work when ad-blockers are enabled
4. obscure ad-keywords or convert them to local images
5. use scripts to compute external ad-related link addresses
6. charge for all content
7. go out of business
If you come to my site, you should accept my business model. If you don't like my business model, then don't come to my site. Sneaking on to a site to enjoy the "free" content without paying seems rather unfair.
Site owners could make internet dark for Norton users. They could make it very hard for the blocked users to use a site by putting more of the content in off-site hosted images. This would make sites incompatible with Nortoned machines (a note or link would explain how to turn off the offending bit of Norton) Or, you could circumvent blocking by hosting all ad-images locally and avoiding telltale ad keywords.
If the ads are worth seeing people will disable the feature, if they aren't find a better revenue model.
And how do consumers see if the ads are worth seeing if they are blocked automatically? In the free market, consumers get to evaluate the merits of something and make a decision. Norton's product removes that opportunity. Even if the ads were wonderfully engaging, you would never see them.
Moore's Law is a market imperative, which to a business is pretty much the same thing as a law.
Interesting insight. I wonder if there is an accidental collusion among semiconductor companies to limit their progress to Moore's observed trend? It seems suspicious to me that the trend should continue for so long without an obvious physical cause. In my orginal post, I suggested that mental and procedural limits kept companies for doubling faster than Moore's Law -- people just don't seem to create magic breakthroughs that double the transistor count in 3 months.
But now I wonder if Moore's law is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone (semiconductor makers, software creators, and chip customers) knows about the Law, so everyone obeys it. Rather than spend time doubling the transistor count in a very short time, companies stick to the industry trend and spend time on other advances (e.g., innovations in microcode, cache, bus, branch-prediction, etc.)
The point is that in business, you need only beat your competitors by some incremental value. Thus, there is little incentive for Intel, for example, to double transistor count in 6 months as few customers would pay much more for the new breakthrough-density processor than they would for a competition-beating processor that only doubles on an 18-24 month schedule.
Perhaps Moores Law holds because everyone obeys it -- makers are too afraid to go slower and there's little competitive advantage to going much faster.
Do the words "Cyber-Armageddon" mean anything to you?
Yes, I would never suggest rewarding or encouraging hackers to create real damage, only encourage them to document what is possible. But perhaps you are right, the prize represents a very dangerous inducement for people to play with fire.
The bigger issue is the potential for flaws in the methodology. I was pointing out a big versimilitude problem with the model vs. real internet. This problem is on two levels. First are the scale issues -- a network might be robust with a 1000 nodes, but fail utterly with 1,000,000 nodes. Second are the implementation issues -- the internet may contain flaws associated with using X version of IE on Y version of Windows when accessing/processing Z-type of content. Small models lack both the scale and heterogenity needed to surface many of the flaws.
But the bigger point is that a small group of researchers, regardless of their brilliance, will probably fail to think up all the exploits created by a much larger group of hackers. I was only trying to propose a mechanism that leverages the hacker population.
I imagine they'll be dealing more with network structural problems than cracking problems.
That's too bad because it seems that most internet disruptions to date arise from exploits of specific OS and software flaws. I'm sure that some aspects of the core structure and standards have built-in limitations, but I suspect it is the diverse implementations of the standards that contain the greatest population of flaws that threaten internet stability.
Perhaps I'm suggesting approaches to research that they don't really want to do. While the grant may be restricted to studying specific theoretic constructs (e.g., Warhol worms) in an idealized network, I am suggesting research into the breadth of actual flaws in the current implementation of the internet.
I'm not sure how they plan to "model" the internet, but I would argue that the internet is its own best model. Anything else will lack some exloits present in the "real" net while have other exploits absent in the real net (bugs in the model's software).
I would take the $5.5 million and divide it up into $5000 prizes that are payable to any hacker that demonstrates and documents a hack on the real net. The profs and grad students could ajudicate the prize giving. They would find at least 1100 exploits this way (fewer if they have to pay those pesky grad students or usurious university accounting department overhead rates).
If letting hackers profit from hacking the actual internet is too scary/illegal, then the university could create a small publically exposed network running a variety of apps, OS, etc.
The changes are largely necessary because of the unsavory consequences of Moore's Law, the famous dictum that states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years
Moore's Law is only an empircal observation -- a convenient curve that fits through the our current data on time and transistor count. There are no gaurantees that this trend will hold for the future.
The point is that no physical phenomena forces the doubling. At best, one could say that mental and procedural limits prevent doubling faster than Moore's so-called Law. Perhaps this is the more interesting Law -- that doubling can't occur faster than every 18 to 24 months.
I would not worry about VoIP operators surviving or not surviving (unless you are invested in them). People don't want VoIP, per se, they want to make cheap phone calls to their friends, family, business associates, etc. VoIP is only a means to that end.
If you look at telco equipment makers, like Lucent, one big new feature is ICD (Internet Call Diversion) that cross diverts standard voice calls on to the internet. CLECs, ILECs, PSTNs can buy this stuff to merge POTS and VoIP and offer free local voice service and low-priced long-distance that just happens to use VoIP.
I'm sure VoIP will become widely adopted and be almost invisible because it will be the most cost-effective way to carry voice communications. Whether any of the current VoIP service providers survive is irrelevant.
Cloud cover plays a big role in repelling solar radiation and keeping the Earth cool. For better or for worse, many sources of pollution help increase cloud cover. Sulfate emissions and jet contrails are two good examples as both stimulate cloud formation. Whether man-made cloud-based cooling is "good" depends on if you think this phenomenon mitigates or masks the problem of global warming.
It will be interesting to see if global warming kicks into high gear once more countries install sulfate scrubbers on coal-fired plants. It would be ironic if attempts to ameliorate one form of environment damage (sulfate emissions) actually exacerbates another form (global warming).
Over at space.com I noticed this interesting article. Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming. The upshot is that the sun seems to emitting 0.05% more energy per decade since the 1970s. My quick calculation suggests that this rise in energy flux should create about a 0.15 degree C change in temperatures each decade (but that rise will probably lag as oceans equilibrate).
Its not surprising the the Sun might be causing this. After all, oscillations is solar output are probably responsible for Greenland being green around 1000 AD and may also end up being responsible for Greenland being green in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The original SOI was silicon on sapphire and was developed in the 60s for rad-hardened military chips and used by HP for workstation processors in the 70s and 80s. And yes, those AMD and IBM processors use SOI.
But if you're looking away from the sun, what stray light are you getting?
If you really start examining telescope optics, you find that many internal surfaces are "visible" to the detector. Light bouncing off of telescope structures, edges of apertures, and the rims of lenses all tend to get into the image. That is why the insides of optical systems are flat-black. The problem is that even the flattest, flat-black actually reflects some light (e.g., black velvet reflects 0.25% of light). Thus, a black object in full sun is much brighter than a magnitude 30 star. Also, any dust on the main mirror or defects in the mirror will scatter light into the optical path.
And if I hear one more person refer to the far side of the moon as the 'dark' side, I'm going to scream.
LOL! AGREED!!!
Compared to "our" side of the moon you won't have the earth hanging in the sky annoyingly
Yes, it does have some disadvantages, but not much. It is true that a nearside observatory would have the issue of Earthshine. This would definitely block a small part of the sky (nearly fixed from the moon's frame of reference, but moving in a galactic frame of reference). And you would probably need to add some features to the telescope design to reduce light scattering. But with no atmosphere to scatter the Earthshine, you would not have the level of light pollution that the moon currently imposes on Earth-bound astronomers.
The big ugly for moon-based optical astronomy would be the 15 days of sunlight that occur in most settings. The best options that I am aware of would put telescopes in craters at each of the moons poles. The crater walls would block sun and Earthshine and the environment would be delightfully chilly for easy use of low-noise detectors.
near-constant illuminated surface allow for massive energy and chemical manufacturing...... .... Telescopes on the far side of the moon would give us a new view of the universe uninterrupted by light
The moon has a 29.5 day cycle meaning that places on the moon experience about 15 days of daylight and about 15 days of night. The far side of the moon gets just as much (and just as little) sunlight as the near side. Only radio telescopes would see a big advantage on the farside by using the moon to block the Earth's noisy radio chatter.
Its a minor point, but it does have implications for what you can do on the moon and the special engineering challenges of the environment (e.g., storing 15 days of solar power).
People would literally be betting on other peoples' lives; a rather morbid idea, don't you think?
It may seem morbid and morally repugnant, but its a trillion dollar industry that has been going on for hundreds of years. The entire life insurance industry (including annuities and death benefits) is all about betting on peoples lives. And liability insurance on big construction projects includes bets on the number of lives lost on the project -- the contractors often get a bonus if not too many lives are lost.
There is nothing wrong with buying and selling risk - many people are willing to buy certainty in an uncertain world. And what bigger uncertainty is there than the uncertainty of when someone will die?
The speed they're talking about is typically GBP (gain bandwidth product), or the frequency at which the gain of the transistor is 1. It's not typically useful at a gain of 1 (for instance, if you want to fan it out to like transistors, it'll need to be at least n for n fanouts).
Good point
Each pipeline stage must complete in a clock cycle. However, say there's a propagation of say, 10 transistors for the output at the end of that pipeline stage to be valid
Very informative. This implies that the GBP of the individual transistors must be sufficient to handle the product of the fanout and length. A single-layer stage with a fan-out of 3 would require 9 GHz transistors to support a 3 GHz clock speed. If the stage has a length of 10, then we would need 90 Ghz transistors to support both the fanout and the length with a 3 GHz clock. (Actually the transistors need to be faster than 90 GHz to make up for propagation delays in the circuit).
So what is the GBP for transistors in the latest, greatest CPUs?
I wonder when some site owner is going to get irate over a slashdotting? The slashdot effect demonstrates one of the core flaws of the internet -- the connectivity to each node vastly exceeds the scalability of each node. It is too easy for a single node to become the focus of an unsustainable level of traffic.
I wonder if there will ever be a ubiquitous opensource equivalent to Akamai's distributed caching system? Although it would be hard to do with dynamic content, static content could be automatically cached in transit. Requests for static web pages that are heading to a destination would be quickly compared to the reverse flow of pages that are in-cache. If the desired page is already there, the protocol would snarf a copy of the in-cache page instead of routing the request all the way to the destination server (actually, it might route the request, but flag it as "fulfilled").
Do any of the multicasting protocols handle this type of on-the-fly, mid-network rebroadcast from cache?
One core assumption of these types of trading markets is that the price of the item is tied to some objective value. In an ideas market, the price should reflect the probability that the stated idea or proposition will be true. Under this assumption, people could use the price of the idea as a proxy for the probability that the idea is true (and make product development or VC decisions with the information).
But some traders act not on the intrinsic value of the item underlying the tradable instrument, they act on the movement of the price. Thus they might buy in on a idea, not because it is undervalued, but because they think the price will go up. Such speculators profit from short-term trades. Called momentum trading, it is a good way to create a bubble in the price that has nothing to do with the true value of the idea or probability that the idea will come to pass.
Markets like this ideas market and the stock market tend to reflect both rational economic facts and human subjective thought patterns. The problem is that one can never tell when the price represents reality or a mass dillusion.
This isn't a FET like the transistors found in computers (and just about everything else). This is bi-polar technology that uses much more power than FET.
True, but there are technologies that combine CMOS and Bipolar for faster CPU designs (I think BiCMOS was more heavily used back in the 90s). Also IBM is working on mixed material, mixed technology that combines SiGe bipolar chips on a CMOS silicon-on-insulator wafer. You never know what those researchers will do next.
At 1 THz, it will take more than 40 clock cycles for a signal to move across a 1/2 inch die of the CPU. And it will take 320 clock cycles for a round-trip to a memory location just 2 inches away. (And that is assuming the signals travel at the speed of light in a vacuum, not the slower speed found in metal traces or optical fibers.) Should make it interesting for chip designers.
We, the consumers, have the right to take steps with our own property (telephones, computers, bandwidth we pay for) to stop practices that annoy us.
/. and Google that derive much of their income from ad revenues).
/. and Google.
Yes, but there are implications attached to the exercise of those rights. If 5% of web users block ads, its no big deal. But if 95% of web users block ads (which will happen in a few years as people move to PCs with Norton 2004), the business models of a number of very valuable web resources go with it (I'm thinking of sites like
Maybe Google will find an alternate model (subscription-access, ads comingled with search hits, or sell itself to Microsoft), maybe it won't. Personally, I don't think that any of these alternatives are better (for me and other Googlers) than the current ad-supported model. So if ubiquitous ad-blockering occurs, I will be saddened by the changes that it forces on sites like
What upsets me the most is that I see small ad-supported sites as the most likely victims of ad-blocking. Big sites will have the technical resources and marketshare to battle ad-blocking. Small sites won't and will see ad-revenues dwindle. Big retailers will win over small ones. People will turn-off ad-blocking when shopping at brand-name sites (like HP) and leave smaller sites that are also broken by ad-blocking. Therefore, ad-blocking will encourage the further consolidation of the web into a few big companies whose dominance ensures that they have the technical means or marketing might to circumvent ad-blocking.
Site owners are culpable in this mess, too. To judge by the virtiol expressed about ads in this thread, site owners have overstepped the bounds of civility with agressive advertizing tactics like pop-ups, pop-unders, and obnoxious ad graphics. Site owners have a right to put those ads on their site, but maybe site owners should not have exercised those rights.
Everyone has rights: consumers can block ads and site owners can put in more obnoxious ads. But too few people on both sides will take responsibility, or even think about, the changes wrought by the widespread exercise of those rights.
(BTW, for the record, I don't run an ad-supported site; I don't block online ads; I do click-through on some ads that interest me on some sites that I wish to support, I don't share files online; and I do skip over most, but not all, TV commericals.)
8. You can also ask for a password that is provided in one banner.
Good one, BlueYoshi. Some more:
9. create a content-for-clickthroughs model - veiwers that click-through gain access to more content (100 pageviews/clickthrough?).
10. outsource all staff to India to offset declining ad-revenue.
11. merge your content site with a retailer's site.
Please give me your website address so I can block it outright
/.) the ads do pay for a bunch of cool stuff on the internet. If the ad-supported model is killed off, I'm sure a bunch of interesting sites (like /.) will go with it. People would like information to be free, but salaries, servers, and bandwidth cost money.
Although we have owned our domain name for nearly a decade, We don't use the web as a customer interface, so there's nothing for you to block.
The bottom line is that whether you hate ads or not (and I hate ads almost as much as most people on
You'll lose business though, and maybe someone needs to try it and go out of business in doing so; however they will have the satisfaction of having stopped freeloaders reading their precious content.
/. will be forced to become ad-blocker-hostile or go subscription-only?
With ad-blocker's, an ad-supported content site owner has already lost the business, but not lost the cost of the freeloaders. When ad-blocking was rare, site owners could afford to ignore it. But if every new PC contains default-on ad-blocking, then they must respond.
Hmmm.... I wonder when
For instance, the past 3 years have seen markedly slower growth than Moore's law predicts
Interesting. Do you know why growth has slowed? Is it because of process barriers -- they can't make the feature size smaller? Or is it because of complexity barriers delaying design roll-outs -- designing chips with tens of millions of transistors is too hard? (I would doubt that competition has slackened much or that the effects of the dot-com crash would have hit Intel transistor count roadmap 3 years ago).
Site owners have countermeasures:
1. convert more content into images and host them offsite -- the site becomes unusable if external images are hidden
2. host ad images and scripts locally so they don't look like ad content
3. use a registration and login processes that do not work when ad-blockers are enabled
4. obscure ad-keywords or convert them to local images
5. use scripts to compute external ad-related link addresses
6. charge for all content
7. go out of business
If you come to my site, you should accept my business model. If you don't like my business model, then don't come to my site. Sneaking on to a site to enjoy the "free" content without paying seems rather unfair.
Site owners could make internet dark for Norton users. They could make it very hard for the blocked users to use a site by putting more of the content in off-site hosted images. This would make sites incompatible with Nortoned machines (a note or link would explain how to turn off the offending bit of Norton) Or, you could circumvent blocking by hosting all ad-images locally and avoiding telltale ad keywords.
I smell an ugly arms race.
If the ads are worth seeing people will disable the feature, if they aren't find a better revenue model. And how do consumers see if the ads are worth seeing if they are blocked automatically? In the free market, consumers get to evaluate the merits of something and make a decision. Norton's product removes that opportunity. Even if the ads were wonderfully engaging, you would never see them.
Moore's Law is a market imperative, which to a business is pretty much the same thing as a law.
Interesting insight. I wonder if there is an accidental collusion among semiconductor companies to limit their progress to Moore's observed trend? It seems suspicious to me that the trend should continue for so long without an obvious physical cause. In my orginal post, I suggested that mental and procedural limits kept companies for doubling faster than Moore's Law -- people just don't seem to create magic breakthroughs that double the transistor count in 3 months.
But now I wonder if Moore's law is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everyone (semiconductor makers, software creators, and chip customers) knows about the Law, so everyone obeys it. Rather than spend time doubling the transistor count in a very short time, companies stick to the industry trend and spend time on other advances (e.g., innovations in microcode, cache, bus, branch-prediction, etc.)
The point is that in business, you need only beat your competitors by some incremental value. Thus, there is little incentive for Intel, for example, to double transistor count in 6 months as few customers would pay much more for the new breakthrough-density processor than they would for a competition-beating processor that only doubles on an 18-24 month schedule.
Perhaps Moores Law holds because everyone obeys it -- makers are too afraid to go slower and there's little competitive advantage to going much faster.
Do the words "Cyber-Armageddon" mean anything to you?
Yes, I would never suggest rewarding or encouraging hackers to create real damage, only encourage them to document what is possible. But perhaps you are right, the prize represents a very dangerous inducement for people to play with fire.
The bigger issue is the potential for flaws in the methodology. I was pointing out a big versimilitude problem with the model vs. real internet. This problem is on two levels. First are the scale issues -- a network might be robust with a 1000 nodes, but fail utterly with 1,000,000 nodes. Second are the implementation issues -- the internet may contain flaws associated with using X version of IE on Y version of Windows when accessing/processing Z-type of content. Small models lack both the scale and heterogenity needed to surface many of the flaws.
But the bigger point is that a small group of researchers, regardless of their brilliance, will probably fail to think up all the exploits created by a much larger group of hackers. I was only trying to propose a mechanism that leverages the hacker population.
I imagine they'll be dealing more with network structural problems than cracking problems.
That's too bad because it seems that most internet disruptions to date arise from exploits of specific OS and software flaws. I'm sure that some aspects of the core structure and standards have built-in limitations, but I suspect it is the diverse implementations of the standards that contain the greatest population of flaws that threaten internet stability.
Perhaps I'm suggesting approaches to research that they don't really want to do. While the grant may be restricted to studying specific theoretic constructs (e.g., Warhol worms) in an idealized network, I am suggesting research into the breadth of actual flaws in the current implementation of the internet.
I'm not sure how they plan to "model" the internet, but I would argue that the internet is its own best model. Anything else will lack some exloits present in the "real" net while have other exploits absent in the real net (bugs in the model's software).
I would take the $5.5 million and divide it up into $5000 prizes that are payable to any hacker that demonstrates and documents a hack on the real net. The profs and grad students could ajudicate the prize giving. They would find at least 1100 exploits this way (fewer if they have to pay those pesky grad students or usurious university accounting department overhead rates).
If letting hackers profit from hacking the actual internet is too scary/illegal, then the university could create a small publically exposed network running a variety of apps, OS, etc.
The changes are largely necessary because of the unsavory consequences of Moore's Law, the famous dictum that states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years
Moore's Law is only an empircal observation -- a convenient curve that fits through the our current data on time and transistor count. There are no gaurantees that this trend will hold for the future.
The point is that no physical phenomena forces the doubling. At best, one could say that mental and procedural limits prevent doubling faster than Moore's so-called Law. Perhaps this is the more interesting Law -- that doubling can't occur faster than every 18 to 24 months.
I would not worry about VoIP operators surviving or not surviving (unless you are invested in them). People don't want VoIP, per se, they want to make cheap phone calls to their friends, family, business associates, etc. VoIP is only a means to that end.
If you look at telco equipment makers, like Lucent, one big new feature is ICD (Internet Call Diversion) that cross diverts standard voice calls on to the internet. CLECs, ILECs, PSTNs can buy this stuff to merge POTS and VoIP and offer free local voice service and low-priced long-distance that just happens to use VoIP.
I'm sure VoIP will become widely adopted and be almost invisible because it will be the most cost-effective way to carry voice communications. Whether any of the current VoIP service providers survive is irrelevant.
Cloud cover plays a big role in repelling solar radiation and keeping the Earth cool. For better or for worse, many sources of pollution help increase cloud cover. Sulfate emissions and jet contrails are two good examples as both stimulate cloud formation. Whether man-made cloud-based cooling is "good" depends on if you think this phenomenon mitigates or masks the problem of global warming.
It will be interesting to see if global warming kicks into high gear once more countries install sulfate scrubbers on coal-fired plants. It would be ironic if attempts to ameliorate one form of environment damage (sulfate emissions) actually exacerbates another form (global warming).
Over at space.com I noticed this interesting article. Sun's Output Increasing in Possible Trend Fueling Global Warming. The upshot is that the sun seems to emitting 0.05% more energy per decade since the 1970s. My quick calculation suggests that this rise in energy flux should create about a 0.15 degree C change in temperatures each decade (but that rise will probably lag as oceans equilibrate).
Its not surprising the the Sun might be causing this. After all, oscillations is solar output are probably responsible for Greenland being green around 1000 AD and may also end up being responsible for Greenland being green in the future.