I am going to restate my view, which has been crystallized by some of the really funny previous posts.
I have been studying human motor development and it is causing me to see computing as a technical activity that is defined and controlled by the input devices and output devices that are connected to the computer. For instance, the input devices for working with visual information are awkward, clumsy, technically limited gadgets. Extracting meaningful information from from any webcam or photosensor or gel plate scan or optical scan of a book page is a lot of ticky tacky programming that is extremely context sensitive. Never the less, there are all kinds of interesting developments as a trickle of problems and input analysis challenges are solved. In any case, no matter what the input device and no matter what the specific conversion goal... it is all programming.
So I would say, don't worry about the programming language too much; after you identify an input device you want to work with then the programming language and development operating system will fall into place.
The best recent improvement of my own personal programming situation is moving to a completely silent Atom based computer with all the memory I can stuff into it and a discipline of sticking with stable well documented free programming languages.
And finally one more unscientific postscript: Have you noticed that the Internet does not yet support any direct, portable database yet at all? On that level of programming abstraction, the whole Internet is still stuck on the same plane as a 1983 vintage dial up BBS.
I have been hoping that Google would have published the Sketchup data structure and released the Sketchup to AutoCad file exporter.
A recent book, titled roughly The Power of Free used Google as an example of a firm that gave away a valuable service in return for a more modest income from side businesses ancillary to what they gave away. (Gmail and Search are examples of this).
I was hoping that Google would see Sketchup as a candidate for fitting into that same business model. Sketchup is one of the most appealing 3-d design applications around and the Sketchup data structure probably is a really well thought out object.
I really like Sketchup (running on Linux via Wine). Google was a firm capable of revealing the Sketchup data structure and using the business model of giving away a valuable component and finding revenue in the side businesses.
In the case of computer aided design, the whole field is locked in prisons of proprietary data structures and astronomical software prices.
A Google business decision to publish the Sketchup data structure and some export tools would have allowed dozens of free open source engineering computer aided design applications to be created.
Instead, Google appears to have done a conventional Sketchup value analysis based on it's relatively small group of Professional edition software buyers. And the result is, Sketchup is now yet another member of the high priced proprietary computer aided design field.
On getting a ham license. I got a technician license after the Loma Prieta earthquake. About 15 years later I had about two weeks of relative unemployment. In about a week using only Internet study resources I upgraded to General. In another 5 study days, using an online practice Amateur Extra exam, Wikipedia and a helpful website on electronics math, I passed the Extra Exam.
On ham radio equipment. The market for equipment like a solid state transceiver made in the last 20 years is extremely high priced, based on checking the San Francisco Craigslist.
I have been disappointed to see Linux has been squeezed to the margins of ham radio. It appears that the software defined radios appearing are sold with a Windows software interface. The open source software radio from Ettus is a research instrument and I don't see much of an amateur radio community supporting it.
As a side editorial comment: I am having a dickens of a frustrating time getting a Linux laptop to record and process sound. I actually wind up rebooting the laptop when the sound devices hiccup after unplugging a microphone or signal cable.
As an institution and cultural object, American ham radio is one of the oldest Federally established non-monetary and non-commercial and non-broadcast communications institutions. Look at the swarm of cell phone businesses squeezing trillions of dollars out of billions of people worldwide reselling electricity at a markup of 50,000 to 1 or more. Amateur Radio has this really special relationship with the previously inaccessible and formerly free electromagnetic radio spectrum.
Considering the very high commercial cash flow generated by the Federally organized oligopoly of selling chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum exclusively to the highest bidder, resulting in no free cell phone service for anybody ever, Amateur radio is a relatively quiet place.
I am in foggy El Granada, California and dealing with shade from several 200+ foot tall Eucalyptus trees that I can not directly cut. If it is at all safe, you can get up on your roof and do some natural science astronomy.
I made a point of working out a safe ladder location because I also have a FTA satellite TV 30" dish, plus gutters, a chimney that needs work, and solar water heater panels I hope to re-install in an earthquake safe configuration. On the side, I plan to do a fun corrugated tubing air heater that warms the under-floor. I figured the pay off for the latter project and that caused me to decide to do it as a science project, with permitting as an after thought.
I bought a 10 watt solar panel from Halted ($80) and let me tell you; solar panel output really drops if even a portion of the panel is shaded. Because of the shade from these trees, I believe I will be better off to settle for using my existing solar water heater panels for thermal heating rather than solar panels with 20% of the generating units limping along partially shaded.
If your roof is flat enough to set up a photo tripod, you can get a pretty good idea of the annual sun path with some simple astronomy gadgets. I used a Brunton pocket transit, but you can get the same result with a magnetic compass, a protractor, a stick that attaches to a photo tripod and a weighted string on one end of the stick, plus knowing your latitude and magnetic declension (your local difference between geographic north and magnetic north). With these things you can find due south, and tilt the stick to model winter and summer extreme points of the sun's path. See Wikipedia Axial tilt for a starting picture and discussion.
Maybe what is wrong is the modern American business profit framework.
This is a case where a whole publishing industry was in place. All the small quality publishing houses were mature businesses with high costs, high quality, good pay for employees, and probably lots of American union printers. The market these publishers were in was getting price sensitive and as a result profit per share was declining. In business terms, the corporation with great assets and great competence but declining profit was ripe for the plucking.
Here is what I think is true: In the USA when an established medium size corporation slips into declining profit, the company can not resist being taken over. If the company turns down a buyout offer, the directors can be sued by stockholders, for example. The owners of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream had to accept the highest offer even though the charitable activities of the company may have not been promised to continue.
Many changes in the math textbook business told in "Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be" article by Annie Keegan are exactly the same in many other American businesses:
The company (or publisher) gets acquired, the new conglomerate company plays the same deck of profit improvement maneuvers: offshore typesetting, cheap no-benefit writing contracts, projects with impossibly short time frames, deliberate obsolescence of existing materials, construction of a labyrinth of side products that are all proprietary.
Notice that the corporate takeover game is a one-way transaction. Is there any way for a big corporation to become smaller? There is General Motors and Kodak as examples and both shrinkages required bankruptcy.
Here are the areas we should review for solutions: 1. Copyright and proprietary book products need to be bypassed. We need an open source mathematics textbook authoring system that produces open source reusable GPL books that can be decomposed and rewritten. Sections of the book can be signed and documented, enabling a book to have layers of authority and reputation. Every section of the book will be capable of hosting a "learn more" area. Every section will be capable of hosting a "related problems from the national college admission exam". The books should be downloadable documents where the cost of downloading is no more than 2x the cost of the Internet connection time. 2. American copyright used to have a statutory requirement that the work be first manufactured and published in the United States. American tax law used to allow a publisher to store an inventory of books for a period of years and not pay tax on the books before the books were sold. These protections were ended as part of a treaty I believe. It is time to revisit the effect of those trade agreements.
3. Here is one for you to check out: It seems to me the only small manufacturing businesses I have seen survive are where the business owner owns the land, the building, and owns the machinery and has low taxes due to being in one place a long time. The little businesses that survived ignored the ideas of maximizing cash flow. The only remaining problem these business faced is transfer of ownership which creates a debt situation. Paying the note on the business sale forces the new owner to play maximize cash flow. The new buyer gets increased taxes because the sale transaction establishes a new basis value for the business.
What the Internet Blueprint project needs to do is create single draft law with supporting documentation. The draft needs hundreds of qualified voting advocates in all 50 of the United States.
The question put to people seeking elective office needs to be "Are you for it or against it?" In every race, the advocates for a sane reform of copyright and patent law need to educate each candidate and get each candidate to answer "Yes or no" whether they will vote for the measure in Congress. The hundreds of advocates need to use the answers they hear to affect who is elected in their district.
Representatives serve for 2 years and Senators serve in three staggered groups for 6 years. November 2012 is the deadline date to have a draft law that can be used as an election litmus test. In 2012, only 1/3 of the Senate will have faced the "For it or against it?" question. By 2014, 2/3 of Senate. By 2016 all of the Senate.
The "For it or Against it" approach requires the draft law and the supporting documentation to meet a high standard of fairness. The balance struck needs a quality economic analysis.
The law may be inspired by thinking from distinct ideological backgrounds (like Linux open source was) but the proposal should not be of a distinct political tone. But there is nothing wrong in giving it a distinct name like: "The American intellectual freedom advancement and copyright and patent revenue balancing Act."
I think we should look for some kind of folding motion to create a relationship where the rights holders and users both benefit, (like automatic, cheap, easy, non-cumulative, distributive and time limited patent licenses.) The present system of building cartels and charging all the market will bear and stealing designs and secrets is a sleazy combative mess. A change in the licensing system will definitely need a quality economic analysis.
I have been writing a blog advocating changing the transportation system. The blog gets zero comments and it has been a very lonely writing experience. And every day I dwell on the irony that I am stuck driving an energy wasting car 12,000 miles per year and I am trying to develop the ideas for a low energy low CO2 reorganization.
So I see the General Transportation File System as a brilliant data structure that makes an expanded world of transportation solutions. The late bus update schemes are interesting problems that can be worked out. I had noticed the bus scheduling application in Google Maps but I wasn't able to figure out how to write programs that accessed that data, and I wasn't able to prototype a data structure like it.
I think the GTFS should be enhanced by using the electronic bridge toll sensor devices in cars to make transportation node maps for people commuting. Suppose you set up a bridge toll sensor at the entrance to a Junior College Campus with 2000 cars commuting daily. If you could get 1/3 of the commuters to pick up two students on the way to school...you could cut the gross CO2 emissions by about 50%.
What a great benefit... use existing transportation technology and get CO2 emission reductions of substantial scale with no capital investment.
I am going to jump off the tracks of the original post: huge mortgage debt for many people (in the USA, especially California) is a problem in the lives of many people (like me and the original poster). That this is actually a problem that can be addressed, can be solved, and can be greatly diminished for coming generations of Americans is the unrecognised American progressive political problem that should be solved over the next twenty years.
Problems with surges in the valuation of land and real estate in a Capitalist society is one way of describing what Henry George wrote about in "Progress and Poverty" in 1879. (The other writer of the time, looking at the same set of problems was Karl Marx.) Both writers sort of spotted the particular weakness in capitalism. I'll describe it in these contemporary terms: Reselling land and buildings for a profit raises the cost basis for the manufacturing and farm goods processing business. In other words, it raises the cost basis for the entire society.
The real estate cost basis of the US has been rising since 1939 (roughly), in contrast China had a real estate cost basis reset event that bottomed out near zero about 1972 when Nixon visited China. The problem with resetting the US real estate cost basis (lowering all real estate prices) is to not wipe out the owner's equity when selling and recover the buyer's down payment when she sells.
Remember Star Trek and any number of utopian stories? Getting caught in the mortgage jam is not a part of any of those stories. Mortgage debt is paralysis for people who want to move on.
It is not the technology, rather it is the opportunity to practice the art of systems design.
Design what?
Designing a whole government is an impossibly huge job. Divide the problem into parts and solve the parts. One big part to fix: How about resolve one key problem that plagues governments worldwide... how to vote the incumbent out of office before the incumbent takes control of the voting system.
Why not use cell phone and Internet technology, together with some statistical sampling to overcome the physical problems of holding elections in Libya? The problem is to be able to vote a leader out of office before that leader seizes control of the election process.
Another way of looking at the copyright licensing problem is the continuing assumption that every single copyrighted item must be sold for a specific price under the terms of a custom sales contract that is unique to every item sold.
OK, I am stating the copyright goods sales assumption in an overly dramatic form.
The first problem that the Internet has created is the electronic distribution of any kind of copyrightable object costs less than a penny. A file that costs 1/10 of a cent to transmit over the Internet is overwhelmed by the 45 cent credit card transaction fee.
The second problem that the Internet has created is there is so much copyrighted material available that every person in the developed world has more copyrighted content available than that person can possibly attend to. As a perceptive analyst has pointed out: The Internet has created a state of information saturation.
A single human being can only absorb x hours of movies, books or research material transmitted over the Internet in a single month. That means, a fair payment for copyrighted material is limited to Y dollars for x hours per month per person.
So what this would point to is a mandatory automatic quitclaim copyrighted material payment system. No matter what the content is, the total payment price should be somewhere around 1 penny per hour of file transfer time. It should be so cheap that a user's personal storage would simply be full and only a relative few items stored.
Many posters have spotted that this post is a rehash, a troll or perhaps a straight faced sendup joke from a design firm.
The graphic art accompanying the original article might have been copied from a 1930's art deco transportation fantasy science fiction book cover.
But here is a really good question: What client paid this design firm to develop this specific presentation? How much do design firms charge per hour? $100 at least?
From the name of the design firm, I guess this is a two person design firm, and the real point of the article is for the designer to promote his design firm.
The modern way to speed up public transit is to publish a distributed database that client applications can combine with client data. See a non-exclusive blog post on this subject by me at:
Use the VI editor's encrypted file service. It uses "X" as a command. Do:help X to read about it. Put into one encrypted file all of your passwords. In each text block of 4 or more lines put this data: URL, date, userid, password, comments From time to time, print this entire file out. VI prints nicely with the ha (hardcopy) command. Staple the pages together and drop it in the bottom of a desk drawer. Tell your heir where to find this paper printout. Bingo your heir has a clue to every important internet account and activity. ---------------- Other enhancements are, you can generate passwords 200 at a time and store them in the same file. Password generators include apg, line numbering passwords can be done with wc -l I put an asterisk in front of each password as I use it, to ensure each password is used only once. ----------------- I have been doing this system for about 15 years. My password printout is 22 pages long. I use this password storage method daily. No typing needed for passwords (use mouse copy), it is best for your personal Linux desk. The whole scheme has only a few (but real) theft weaknesses.
What I see as a problem is there is no organization or lobby to draft a people and citizen friendly Copyright and Patent Reform Act.
Underlying that problem is the apparent political legislative power imbalance that is some version of 300 leopard seals versus 3 million penguins. The relatively few big sponsors of predatory legislation are overwhelming the interests of the hundreds of millions of consumers or users of Internet media. ---- In the previous posts, there are a number of really interesting nomenclatures and process descriptions of what is happening. The reality is, there are 8 or 9 lawyers and some unknown millions of dollars of lobbyist energy paid for by the leopard seals. Their law is just a file on some lawyer's word processor, that is being tweaked and handed over by maybe 5 lobbying firms working closely with 20% of the Congress, with another million dollars of campaign money and 20 buzz word phrases for every incumbent Congressman regardless of party affiliation and regardless of the Congressman's position for or against making the most money for America. ---
In the end, the argument that nasty aggressive Copyright and Patent laws make the most money for America in general will prevail over any proposal that provides less money and less aggrandizement. No politician can withstand the pressure to pass laws to make America strong, rich and successful. ---- So we have to steal that argument "Make America strong, rich and successful" and write a law that caps the unlimited avarice and extraction potential of patent and copyright. --- The starting point for that new law are as follows: Pick up the concerns of anti-trust and common carrier regulation from the 19th Century Progressive movement. The cellphone patent wars are leading to a few companies that exclude all the possible free software and hardware stacks.FCC radio bandwidth auctions have defrauded the entire American people of a common carrier service that should cost no more than 5 times the electricity used. Pick up the recent observation that the max fair price of Internet streaming media is now limited by the human attention bandwidth. No human being can consume more than x hours of media in a month. Those x hours of media need a max price. None of this $1200 per song file sharing stuff. There is no Internet media worth (to me) more than $.60 per hour. Put it on my Internet access bill and go away. --- Then we need a lobbying solution that will create pressure on every candidate running for office, a draft law, a slogan and campaign money: The starter slogan "Stop screwing the American people with outrageous prices for Internet media."
The sagemath.org open source computation engine has a 2 line benchmark that computes Pi to 5 million digits.
It took my Atom desktop computer about 15 minutes. I watched it with Top. It sucked up 99 to 100% of the CPU and strangely only 200 Mb out of 2 Gig of RAM. Also, it didn't use the Linux swap at all. It kind of got me puzzling that my Ubuntu Linux might be missing some performance optimizations.
What to do with it? Resume studying mathematics. Make a pretty good symmetric encryption gadget with a CD of huge encryption keys.
A few years ago I found out that the explorers in the science of paper folding have proposed that any three dimensional physical object can be formed by folding a single sheet. That resonated with my contact with embryology (which included watching frog eggs divide under a stereo microscope). And it still resonates with my work with special education kids where I puzzle about which layers of their motor skill function stack are not working well.
So another burning question, or at least request for explanation is: What is the shape and structure of the embryo before the HOX genes begin unwinding. What is the shape and structure when the second HOX gene begins acting? Is there a neural tube present at this time? Does the HOX gene start a series of surface tension changes in a single cell that sets off an extrusion?
The most important thing is you now have a general idea of some of the big problems, big questions, and most active areas of inquiry and experimentation in your field.
The problem for you is to continue studying, exploring and developing in one of the areas. Keep a candle of inquiry lit. Keep in mind the information paradox.
I would say, go look at groups doing sciences like astronomy, particle physics, language analysis and chemistry as places where you will find challenges to implement computer science.
Mathematics has also picked up a really interesting open source tool in sage-math. If you are inclined, you can teach yourself advanced computer implemented mathematics with sage-math, such as cryptography. Or implement demos of selected items from Knuth's volume 4.
Now I have questions for you. It seems to me that your formal education has not prepared you to deal with some of the really big situations and problems of the American society. One of my kids just graduated from college and she doesn't have answers either. These questions need to be worked on during your adult life: You are taking up employment in the nation with the largest prisoner population of all time.(see Wikipedia American prison population). This is a real crummy recession, why don't you figure out a fix to the boom bust cycle? (Note, Henry George, American writer, here.) Why are we spending 10 years at warfare and engaging with religious fanatics on their terms? (Note, Martin Luther King, American religious thinker, ignored, here) Why are we using the same patent system that gives us a succession of dying corporate oligopolies?
Who has written the book or article that works out how American patent and copyright law can be brought back to benefiting the people?
One critic a few years ago said that we are living with a "Pre VCR Law in a digital You-Tube age."
So the question I have is, what political group or thinker has a draft of a better more citizen favourable patent and copyright law? Who understands how to get enough elected politicians all moving on patent and copyright law reform?
I think to myself, in the '80's Ralph Nader was talking about problems with American corporate power. And in this current Presidential campaign, Ron Paul simply has a broad brush attack against our law culture and he doesn't speak specifically about patent and copyright reform.
Business method patents, Java litigation, patent notices on websites, $1500 dollar per song penalties, and this sucking film of illegality about every kind of digital device re-purposing really does add up to a pattern of exploitation. All this legal brutality resembles the English trying to prohibit the export of textile and steam engine technology in the 1700's.
The persistence of cables being crossed and tangled in the simplest computer installation got me studying topology and knot theory. One book I like is Formal Knot Theory by Kauffman.
The area where crossings and tangles get much simpler is if you organize a single cable into a loop before storing it. If you hold both ends in one hand, then folding the remaining cable becomes a very symmetric process. For coiling a cable, routing successive turns on opposite sides of the plane of the coil does something very interesting, it creates a balanced number of twists in each direction.
On the mess behind my desk. I am at last a member of the let 'er rip and dustbunnies galore group.
In this current down economic climate (referring to the time period 2008 to 2011) neither boards of directors, nor management nor the government looks good.
Sort of incidentally (following on a college education that had about 4 semesters of American history and American culture classes) I have been puzzling about the American corporation and reading the occasional book on the subject. The first thing I feel these books show is that American corporations are creatures caught within the economic and cultural currents of the time. Sorry but I am naming the titles from memory.
The last book on the list is The Decline and Fall of the American Auto Industry, published around 2009 a few months after the General Motors bailout. Here is a book that principally tells the story of the decline of General Motors Corporation with vignettes of decisions and policies forced upon top management and the GM board of directors from about 1970 down to the bailout. These are the years where General Motors could do everything except build a good small car. At the board of directors level, the choices kept being matters of avoiding the more awful.The board of directors finally wound up with a General Manager whose speciality was promising things would be better. The problem that was never ever solved (and still isn't solved in my opinion) is how to make a 4 cylinder engine as good as the 1700 cc Honda (and keep it in production even if it costs a few dollars more.). No board of directors can solve that problem.
The next two corporation books are: My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (mid 1960's) and the 1950 vintage classic about General Motors, The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker. These books are the classic duo about a big corporation and a really gifted and eloquent Chief Executive Officer. The only problem is both books were written in the middle of a 40 year richest in the world expansion of the mass production automobile. In the present down economy,the same high quality people sitting on the Board and occupying the top management simply do not look as good... no matter what they do.
Regarding your wish for a new way of doing business, I would say look back at the 1980's... The Regan Presidency Years... where job security began to evaporate. That was the era when the conglomerate corporation began to operate. This is when the process of buying up smaller corporations and doing obscene things to their balance sheets and business plans began. A social history of this era up to the present (not focused very clearly on Corporations) is The Great Inflation and It's Aftermath by Samuelson.
So one way of looking for a new way of doing business is to ask, how can we change the economy of scale back so that stable, quality, relatively low profit and low debt Corporations are not subject to being bought up, stripped of their cash, move the manufacturing to contract offshore factories, loaded with debt and resold on the stock market to investors. Recent corporations worthy of study are Sunbeam, Mr. Coffee and Kidde (fire extinguishers).
This product is a really interesting take on the problem of presenting a semiconductor junction electricity generating device to the sun.
I urge you to go to the solyndra.com website and look at the product description.
The design places the solar electric generator in something that looks like a 4 foot long fluorescent lamp tube. Look at the end cap of the tube, It is a spline that locks the tube against rotation. It looks like the generating unit is a 4 foot tube that snaps into a frame, and the ends of the tube are the electrical output terminals.
I built solar energy collector devices in 1973 and there are a lot of things about the Solyndra design that I like.
The first thing I did in my projects was put the active collector in a tube, and experiment with reflector designs. One reflector was a trough made of Ultracal sculpture plaster with an aluminium foil lining. I modelled parabolas and circles for their focal effectiveness. A second reflector was a Fresnel reflector, the prototype was machined out of aluminium. The ideal would be a sheet of 1 1/2" thick Celotex roof insulation with a reflective aluminium Fresnel reflector embossed in the top layer or attached with a hot wax or melted plastic membrane. That means you are looking at insulated 100 year roof lifetimes where individual panels can be replaced without having to do the entire roof.
The design point I would make is: the common flat plastic and glass solar electric generator panels are clumsy, they are not easy to replace, they can not be opened and repaired, and they are going to be a bear to deal with when they get old, start failing and have to be disturbed to re-roof the house underneath.
The beauty of the tube type solar electric generator is you can replace them individually, They can be disassembled, rebuilt, reloaded with the latest generation of thin film generator, and you can operate your device in an inert gas environment.
An earlier post that the man who started this design, Dr. Chris Gronet, "has transitioned to the role of advisor and consultant." indicates that the current bankruptcy is for wresting ownership of the design into the hands of new investment money.
Another thing that is visible from the product information pages at Solyndra is the company has been trying to both build a semiconductor device, and deliver a proprietary mounting, shipping and installation system around the device and then sell into the very limited market of flat roof industrial buildings.
Notice that the literature says "lightweight and self-ballasting." and it also says rated for hail and 130 mile per hour wind. These phrases indicate a little too much optimism about the realities of mounting stuff on a roof for 25 years.
Besides wresting control, perhaps this bankruptcy is in anticipation of a product replacement request following the hurricane of last week.
Here is a thought: The tube type solar electricity generator needs to become a generic product in it's own right. A long lasting re-roofing solution needs to become a product in it's own right, You buy a thick 100 year rated insulating surface for your existing roof with the thickness and configuration depending on your climate and roof slope. Finally, you get the focusing surface of the new insulating roof moulded or tuned based on your longitude and roof orientation. Then the solar installer screws the tube mounting frames to the roof according to moulded dimples in the custom reflector surface. The generator tubes snap into place and the installation is ready to deliver 600 volts DC.
So what is the point of having a generic tubular solar electricity generator. Note the Solendra product has a liquid filling called an "optical coupling agent". Hey, suppose this liquid (I guess it is kerosene!) is replaced with an optical energy storage fluid? Something that will make the tube generate electricity after the sun goes down. Now you can see some more elegant advantages to a tubular solar energy generating device?
I send my sympathy to Steve Jobs, as with understatement he reveals he is in mortal straits.
The business started by Steve Jobs you can look at as a very pure business strategy play. They sell a computer hardware and software package that is primarily marketed to individuals.
At the onset, I mean the computer club and wire wrap era, there was this giddy excitement at having a CPU, some memory and a way of executing a programmable instruction set that could do any logic in software.
There have been a couple really big forks in the intellectual road since then: The IBM open bus and motherboard, the BSD software release license, the GNU and open source software system, TCP/IP, the Web, the CPU size and speed increase, the memory density increase, the plague of music copyright, the rise of software and business patents as an instrument of oligopoly, and the blocking of web sites by government administrative demand.
You can look at the company Apple and the products it has made and see how the company handled each of these computer developments. For each of these computer developments, Apple has stayed within a very careful framework: Every year Apple has avoided doing anything that allowed their customers to make non-Apple products the central part of their computer use.
An illustration of how Apple has been practising business strategy (as beyond simple design or programming) is the recent appearance of touch screen devices. Part of the strategy was waiting for key surface acoustic wave touch sensor patents to expire and at the same time developing and patenting software that worked with the patent expired technology. Remember Apple briefly included a USB wand touch pad with IMac laptops around 2004 ? (I guess) They added these gadgets to facilitate development of patentable display software.
So I look at Apple as having played a consistent business chess game. Their customer has been the individual and the business activity has been to recapture the customer over and over. Now those incredible stock prices, that is because Apple succeeds in charging a $40 to $200 per unit retail premium.
The real revolution is still open source software running on generic hardware using an open Web and serving peaceful human needs. It is interesting and elegant, that as closed as Apple computer hardware may be, their machinery still does many of the things one might wish of an ethically and socially ideal computer.
Well I just spent this weekend trying to find some neat physics to pep up my interest in amateur radio. I am also angling to pep up my resume so I can wiggle into a job where there is a particle accelerator.
I am going to reflect on the original post with a viewpoint that focuses back thirty-nine years to 1972.
That was the year Nixon went to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and HP introduced the electronic slide rule calculator model HP-35. I was freshly graduated from college working in the machine shop of a small packaging machinery manufacturer.
That year I was offered a three unit residential property on an 100 x 100 lot in the Mount Washington district of Los Angeles for $72,000. My Dad said "the pipes are bad" and wouldn't help me buy the property. Within a year, I had been kicked out of my cheap rent cabin on this same property. The property quickly changed hands and began rising in value.
So I date 1972 as the start of steady aggressive real estate value increase, at least in California. I was an early baby boomer and real estate prices were racing ahead of me.
Meanwhile, regarding the Nixon trip to China, this is a starting date where Chinese land values, real estate values and rate-of-pay for labor had been reset by the Communist revolution.
So here is the view I propose: Starting about 40 years ago, the cost of land, industrial buildings, residential homes and apartments has been going up in the United States. Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China, thanks to the Communist revolution, had an enormous "land and real-estate value reset" that has kept land and real estate cheap for much longer than 1972.
The huge difference in land and real estate value means it costs a lot more to live in the United States than in China.
These facts are the financial basis for why it costs a lot less to make things in the PRC than in the USA.
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In the decade around 1982, in America there was a perception of a Japanese manufacturing assault on America. What became of the Japanese business success of those years? In Japan there was an epidemic of real estate speculation. At one time Tokyo floor space sold for $1,000 per square foot. One of the effects noted has been 20 years of stagflation. The Japanese economy did not recover after several years of Keynesian spending on public works projects.
For instance, eight years ago the water pump in the Japanese engine in my Dodge Caravan was made in Japan. Another water pump for the same car bought one year ago (in 2010) was manufactured in China. Yet another well established manufacturing job moved to China.
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So what to do? I am presently reading Progress and Poverty by the American economic thinker Henry George. He did a classic economic analysis of American capitalism in 1890. Yes he was within a few decades of being a contemporary of Carl Marx. One point I note is he identifies the activity of buying and selling real estate for a profit as not a part of capitalism per se.
This report of the sale of Instructables to Autodesk makes it clear to me that the free software community needs a common drawing data structure and a set of user drawing interchange utilities.
The world of free drafting and CAD doesn't have the many little component drawings available to the users of AutoCAD proprietary drafting software. From the previous poster's comments, AutoDesk is unlikely to make any user data files or data structure information more available in the future.
I just finished spending 2 months reviewing many of the free CAD programs. I am looking for programs and applications to design a solar water heater installation, a radio antenna, a fractal made out of wire, an electrical circuit and a wagon. Is there anything yet to match sheets of quad paper, a.5 mm mechanical pencil and a HP-48 calculator and some assorted handbooks?
What AutoDesk seems to have, that is never released by AutoDesk, is the Autocad user drawing data structure and the little drawings of ready to use components.
What is missing from PythonCAD, Qcad, Blender, and Varkon is libraries of little drawings called "components". (An interesting program is the Beta prototype "Fritzing" for designing Arduino breadboards. Fritzing is all about placing components and drawing wires between the components. It has a delightful simple data structure for doing this.)
The whole world of CAD or mechanical drafting programs is wrapped up in incompatible islands of proprietary user drawing data structures. It seems to spring from business based engineers who want to be paid directly for every single use of their engineering knowledge.
Since it is partly free and it does run on Linux (with Wine), I like Google Sketchup. The drawing app is genius, the user data structure is proprietary and the data can be exported only using the $500 professional version of Sketchup. I wish they would publish their user data structure.
It would be both fun and a first class challenge to write conversion utilities to convert files from Sketchup to Blender, from Sketchup to PythonCAD and Qcad. From the CAD programs back and forth to SAGE and Xnec2c. Here is an interesting problem in doing user data structure conversions: When doing the file conversion, you need a way to not throw away data that one program uses and another doesn't. One way is to provide for internal comments within the user application data structure for each drawing application. And figure out how to keep each comment together with some active point within the data structure.
The problem with the story is the happy little song at the end.
The story attempts to resolve the menace of the Stuxnet worm by suggesting that Iran now knows how to avoid another worm infection.
The competing conclusion is an exceptional piece of software has been described at the design level.
The remaining part of the puzzle is: Did the researchers figure out what linker and what compiler was used to build the darn thing? Have they determined the programming language used from the patterns of data and code? Are the sections of the worm static and fixed in size or are the sizes variable and reached by means of a jump table? Are there pieces of assembly language code present? Does the code have assembly language sequences designed to derail a debugger? Does the worm design show size and configuration changes as the production worm was tweaked?
Finally, are any of the zero day exploits mentioned the result of actions below the level of the operating system? In effect, are there hardware level exploits that can affect any IBM compatible personal computer no matter what operating system it runs? The mention of a computer that repeatedly reboots at the beginning of the article might be just the symptom of the super duper ultra low level exploit, if it exists.
Slashdot Mirror
I am going to restate my view, which has been crystallized by some of the really funny previous posts.
I have been studying human motor development and it is causing me to see computing as a technical activity that is defined and controlled by the input devices and output devices that are connected to the computer.
For instance, the input devices for working with visual information are awkward, clumsy, technically limited gadgets. Extracting meaningful information from from any webcam or photosensor or gel plate scan or optical scan of a book page is a lot of ticky tacky programming that is extremely context sensitive.
Never the less, there are all kinds of interesting developments as a trickle of problems and input analysis challenges are solved.
In any case, no matter what the input device and no matter what the specific conversion goal... it is all programming.
So I would say, don't worry about the programming language too much; after you identify an input device you want to work with then the programming language and development operating system will fall into place.
The best recent improvement of my own personal programming situation is moving to a completely silent Atom based computer with all the memory I can stuff into it and a discipline of sticking with stable well documented free programming languages.
And finally one more unscientific postscript: Have you noticed that the Internet does not yet support any direct, portable database yet at all? On that level of programming abstraction, the whole Internet is still stuck on the same plane as a 1983 vintage dial up BBS.
I have been hoping that Google would have published the Sketchup data structure and released the Sketchup to AutoCad file exporter.
A recent book, titled roughly The Power of Free used Google as an example of a firm that gave away a valuable service in return for a more modest income from side businesses ancillary to what they gave away. (Gmail and Search are examples of this).
I was hoping that Google would see Sketchup as a candidate for fitting into that same business model. Sketchup is one of the most appealing 3-d design applications around and the Sketchup data structure probably is a really well thought out object.
I really like Sketchup (running on Linux via Wine). Google was a firm capable of revealing the Sketchup data structure and using the business model of giving away a valuable component and finding revenue in the side businesses.
In the case of computer aided design, the whole field is locked in prisons of proprietary data structures and astronomical software prices.
A Google business decision to publish the Sketchup data structure and some export tools would have allowed dozens of free open source engineering computer aided design applications to be created.
Instead, Google appears to have done a conventional Sketchup value analysis based on it's relatively small group of Professional edition software buyers. And the result is, Sketchup is now yet another member of the high priced proprietary computer aided design field.
On getting a ham license. I got a technician license after the Loma Prieta earthquake. About 15 years later I had about two weeks of relative unemployment. In about a week using only Internet study resources I upgraded to General. In another 5 study days, using an online practice Amateur Extra exam, Wikipedia and a helpful website on electronics math, I passed the Extra Exam.
On ham radio equipment. The market for equipment like a solid state transceiver made in the last 20 years is extremely high priced, based on checking the San Francisco Craigslist.
I have been disappointed to see Linux has been squeezed to the margins of ham radio. It appears that the software defined radios appearing are sold with a Windows software interface. The open source software radio from Ettus is a research instrument and I don't see much of an amateur radio community supporting it.
As a side editorial comment: I am having a dickens of a frustrating time getting a Linux laptop to record and process sound. I actually wind up rebooting the laptop when the sound devices hiccup after unplugging a microphone or signal cable.
As an institution and cultural object, American ham radio is one of the oldest Federally established non-monetary and non-commercial and non-broadcast communications institutions. Look at the swarm of cell phone businesses squeezing trillions of dollars out of billions of people worldwide reselling electricity at a markup of 50,000 to 1 or more. Amateur Radio has this really special relationship with the previously inaccessible and formerly free electromagnetic radio spectrum.
Considering the very high commercial cash flow generated by the Federally organized oligopoly of selling chunks of the electromagnetic spectrum exclusively to the highest bidder, resulting in no free cell phone service for anybody ever, Amateur radio is a relatively quiet place.
I am in foggy El Granada, California and dealing with shade from several 200+ foot tall Eucalyptus trees that I can not directly cut. If it is at all safe, you can get up on your roof and do some natural science astronomy.
I made a point of working out a safe ladder location because I also have a FTA satellite TV 30" dish, plus gutters, a chimney that needs work, and solar water heater panels I hope to re-install in an earthquake safe configuration. On the side, I plan to do a fun corrugated tubing air heater that warms the under-floor. I figured the pay off for the latter project and that caused me to decide to do it as a science project, with permitting as an after thought.
I bought a 10 watt solar panel from Halted ($80) and let me tell you; solar panel output really drops if even a portion of the panel is shaded. Because of the shade from these trees, I believe I will be better off to settle for using my existing solar water heater panels for thermal heating rather than solar panels with 20% of the generating units limping along partially shaded.
If your roof is flat enough to set up a photo tripod, you can get a pretty good idea of the annual sun path with some simple astronomy gadgets. I used a Brunton pocket transit, but you can get the same result with a magnetic compass, a protractor, a stick that attaches to a photo tripod and a weighted string on one end of the stick, plus knowing your latitude and magnetic declension (your local difference between geographic north and magnetic north). With these things you can find due south, and tilt the stick to model winter and summer extreme points of the sun's path. See Wikipedia Axial tilt for a starting picture and discussion.
Maybe what is wrong is the modern American business profit framework.
This is a case where a whole publishing industry was in place. All the small quality publishing houses were mature businesses with high costs, high quality, good pay for employees, and probably lots of American union printers. The market these publishers were in was getting price sensitive and as a result profit per share was declining. In business terms, the corporation with great assets and great competence but declining profit was ripe for the plucking.
Here is what I think is true: In the USA when an established medium size corporation slips into declining profit, the company can not resist being taken over. If the company turns down a buyout offer, the directors can be sued by stockholders, for example. The owners of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream had to accept the highest offer even though the charitable activities of the company may have not been promised to continue.
Many changes in the math textbook business told in "Afraid of Your Child's Math Textbook? You Should Be" article by Annie Keegan are exactly the same in many other American businesses:
The company (or publisher) gets acquired, the new conglomerate company plays the same deck of profit improvement maneuvers: offshore typesetting, cheap no-benefit writing contracts, projects with impossibly short time frames, deliberate obsolescence of existing materials, construction of a labyrinth of side products that are all proprietary.
Notice that the corporate takeover game is a one-way transaction. Is there any way for a big corporation to become smaller? There is General Motors and Kodak as examples and both shrinkages required bankruptcy.
Here are the areas we should review for solutions:
1. Copyright and proprietary book products need to be bypassed. We need an open source mathematics textbook authoring system that produces open source reusable GPL books that can be decomposed and rewritten. Sections of the book can be signed and documented, enabling a book to have layers of authority and reputation. Every section of the book will be capable of hosting a "learn more" area. Every section will be capable of hosting a "related problems from the national college admission exam". The books should be downloadable documents where the cost of downloading is no more than 2x the cost of the Internet connection time.
2. American copyright used to have a statutory requirement that the work be first manufactured and published in the United States. American tax law used to allow a publisher to store an inventory of books for a period of years and not pay tax on the books before the books were sold. These protections were ended as part of a treaty I believe. It is time to revisit the effect of those trade agreements.
3. Here is one for you to check out: It seems to me the only small manufacturing businesses I have seen survive are where the business owner owns the land, the building, and owns the machinery and has low taxes due to being in one place a long time. The little businesses that survived ignored the ideas of maximizing cash flow. The only remaining problem these business faced is transfer of ownership which creates a debt situation. Paying the note on the business sale forces the new owner to play maximize cash flow. The new buyer gets increased taxes because the sale transaction establishes a new basis value for the business.
What the Internet Blueprint project needs to do is create single draft law with supporting documentation. The draft needs hundreds of qualified voting advocates in all 50 of the United States.
The question put to people seeking elective office needs to be "Are you for it or against it?" In every race, the advocates for a sane reform of copyright and patent law need to educate each candidate and get each candidate to answer "Yes or no" whether they will vote for the measure in Congress. The hundreds of advocates need to use the answers they hear to affect who is elected in their district.
Representatives serve for 2 years and Senators serve in three staggered groups for 6 years. November 2012 is the deadline date to have a draft law that can be used as an election litmus test. In 2012, only 1/3 of the Senate will have faced the "For it or against it?" question. By 2014, 2/3 of Senate. By 2016 all of the Senate.
The "For it or Against it" approach requires the draft law and the supporting documentation to meet a high standard of fairness. The balance struck needs a quality economic analysis.
The law may be inspired by thinking from distinct ideological backgrounds (like Linux open source was) but the proposal should not be of a distinct political tone. But there is nothing wrong in giving it a distinct name like: "The American intellectual freedom advancement and copyright and patent revenue balancing Act."
I think we should look for some kind of folding motion to create a relationship where the rights holders and users both benefit, (like automatic, cheap, easy, non-cumulative, distributive and time limited patent licenses.) The present system of building cartels and charging all the market will bear and stealing designs and secrets is a sleazy combative mess. A change in the licensing system will definitely need a quality economic analysis.
I have been writing a blog advocating changing the transportation system. The blog gets zero comments and it has been a very lonely writing experience. And every day I dwell on the irony that I am stuck driving an energy wasting car 12,000 miles per year and I am trying to develop the ideas for a low energy low CO2 reorganization.
So I see the General Transportation File System as a brilliant data structure that makes an expanded world of transportation solutions. The late bus update schemes are interesting problems that can be worked out. I had noticed the bus scheduling application in Google Maps but I wasn't able to figure out how to write programs that accessed that data, and I wasn't able to prototype a data structure like it.
I think the GTFS should be enhanced by using the electronic bridge toll sensor devices in cars to make transportation node maps for people commuting. Suppose you set up a bridge toll sensor at the entrance to a Junior College Campus with 2000 cars commuting daily. If you could get 1/3 of the commuters to pick up two students on the way to school...you could cut the gross CO2 emissions by about 50%.
What a great benefit... use existing transportation technology and get CO2 emission reductions of substantial scale with no capital investment.
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/
someone who can't really risk the mortgage...
I am going to jump off the tracks of the original post: huge mortgage debt for many people (in the USA, especially California) is a problem in the lives of many people (like me and the original poster). That this is actually a problem that can be addressed, can be solved, and can be greatly diminished for coming generations of Americans is the unrecognised American progressive political problem that should be solved over the next twenty years.
Problems with surges in the valuation of land and real estate in a Capitalist society is one way of describing what Henry George wrote about in "Progress and Poverty" in 1879. (The other writer of the time, looking at the same set of problems was Karl Marx.) Both writers sort of spotted the particular weakness in capitalism. I'll describe it in these contemporary terms: Reselling land and buildings for a profit raises the cost basis for the manufacturing and farm goods processing business. In other words, it raises the cost basis for the entire society.
The real estate cost basis of the US has been rising since 1939 (roughly), in contrast China had a real estate cost basis reset event that bottomed out near zero about 1972 when Nixon visited China. The problem with resetting the US real estate cost basis (lowering all real estate prices) is to not wipe out the owner's equity when selling and recover the buyer's down payment when she sells.
Remember Star Trek and any number of utopian stories? Getting caught in the mortgage jam is not a part of any of those stories. Mortgage debt is paralysis for people who want to move on.
It is not the technology, rather it is the opportunity to practice the art of systems design.
Design what?
Designing a whole government is an impossibly huge job. Divide the problem into parts and solve the parts. One big part to fix: How about resolve one key problem that plagues governments worldwide... how to vote the incumbent out of office before the incumbent takes control of the voting system.
Why not use cell phone and Internet technology, together with some statistical sampling to overcome the physical problems of holding elections in Libya? The problem is to be able to vote a leader out of office before that leader seizes control of the election process.
Another way of looking at the copyright licensing problem is the continuing assumption that every single copyrighted item must be sold for a specific price under the terms of a custom sales contract that is unique to every item sold.
OK, I am stating the copyright goods sales assumption in an overly dramatic form.
The first problem that the Internet has created is the electronic distribution of any kind of copyrightable object costs less than a penny. A file that costs 1/10 of a cent to transmit over the Internet is overwhelmed by the 45 cent credit card transaction fee.
The second problem that the Internet has created is there is so much copyrighted material available that every person in the developed world has more copyrighted content available than that person can possibly attend to. As a perceptive analyst has pointed out: The Internet has created a state of information saturation.
A single human being can only absorb x hours of movies, books or research material transmitted over the Internet in a single month. That means, a fair payment for copyrighted material is limited to Y dollars for x hours per month per person.
So what this would point to is a mandatory automatic quitclaim copyrighted material payment system. No matter what the content is, the total payment price should be somewhere around 1 penny per hour of file transfer time. It should be so cheap that a user's personal storage would simply be full and only a relative few items stored.
Many posters have spotted that this post is a rehash, a troll or perhaps a straight faced sendup joke from a design firm.
The graphic art accompanying the original article might have been copied from a 1930's art deco transportation fantasy science fiction book cover.
But here is a really good question: What client paid this design firm to develop this specific presentation? How much do design firms charge per hour? $100 at least?
From the name of the design firm, I guess this is a two person design firm, and the real point of the article is for the designer to promote his design firm.
The modern way to speed up public transit is to publish a distributed database that client applications can combine with client data. See a non-exclusive blog post on this subject by me at:
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/2011/04/ride-sharing-can-use-cell-phones-to.html
Use the VI editor's encrypted file service. It uses "X" as a command. Do :help X to read about it.
Put into one encrypted file all of your passwords. In each text block of 4 or more lines put this data: URL, date, userid, password, comments
From time to time, print this entire file out. VI prints nicely with the ha (hardcopy) command.
Staple the pages together and drop it in the bottom of a desk drawer.
Tell your heir where to find this paper printout.
Bingo your heir has a clue to every important internet account and activity.
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Other enhancements are, you can generate passwords 200 at a time and store them in the same file.
Password generators include apg, line numbering passwords can be done with wc -l
I put an asterisk in front of each password as I use it, to ensure each password is used only once.
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I have been doing this system for about 15 years. My password printout is 22 pages long.
I use this password storage method daily. No typing needed for passwords (use mouse copy), it is best for your personal Linux desk.
The whole scheme has only a few (but real) theft weaknesses.
What I see as a problem is there is no organization or lobby to draft a people and citizen friendly Copyright and Patent Reform Act.
Underlying that problem is the apparent political legislative power imbalance that is some version of 300 leopard seals versus 3 million penguins. The relatively few big sponsors of predatory legislation are overwhelming the interests of the hundreds of millions of consumers or users of Internet media.
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In the previous posts, there are a number of really interesting nomenclatures and process descriptions of what is happening. The reality is, there are 8 or 9 lawyers and some unknown millions of dollars of lobbyist energy paid for by the leopard seals. Their law is just a file on some lawyer's word processor, that is being tweaked and handed over by maybe 5 lobbying firms working closely with 20% of the Congress, with another million dollars of campaign money and 20 buzz word phrases for every incumbent Congressman regardless of party affiliation and regardless of the Congressman's position for or against making the most money for America.
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In the end, the argument that nasty aggressive Copyright and Patent laws make the most money for America in general will prevail over any proposal that provides less money and less aggrandizement. No politician can withstand the pressure to pass laws to make America strong, rich and successful.
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So we have to steal that argument "Make America strong, rich and successful" and write a law that caps the unlimited avarice and extraction potential of patent and copyright.
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The starting point for that new law are as follows: Pick up the concerns of anti-trust and common carrier regulation from the 19th Century Progressive movement. The cellphone patent wars are leading to a few companies that exclude all the possible free software and hardware stacks.FCC radio bandwidth auctions have defrauded the entire American people of a common carrier service that should cost no more than 5 times the electricity used. Pick up the recent observation that the max fair price of Internet streaming media is now limited by the human attention bandwidth. No human being can consume more than x hours of media in a month. Those x hours of media need a max price. None of this $1200 per song file sharing stuff. There is no Internet media worth (to me) more than $.60 per hour. Put it on my Internet access bill and go away.
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Then we need a lobbying solution that will create pressure on every candidate running for office, a draft law, a slogan and campaign money: The starter slogan "Stop screwing the American people with outrageous prices for Internet media."
The sagemath.org open source computation engine has a 2 line benchmark that computes Pi to 5 million digits.
It took my Atom desktop computer about 15 minutes. I watched it with Top. It sucked up 99 to 100% of the CPU and strangely only 200 Mb out of 2 Gig of RAM.
Also, it didn't use the Linux swap at all. It kind of got me puzzling that my Ubuntu Linux might be missing some performance optimizations.
What to do with it? Resume studying mathematics. Make a pretty good symmetric encryption gadget with a CD of huge encryption keys.
easy:
sage: numerical_approx(pi,digits=50)
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399
takes a long time:
sage: time a = N(pi, digits=5000000)
A few years ago I found out that the explorers in the science of paper folding have proposed that any three dimensional physical object can be formed by folding a single sheet. That resonated with my contact with embryology (which included watching frog eggs divide under a stereo microscope). And it still resonates with my work with special education kids where I puzzle about which layers of their motor skill function stack are not working well.
So another burning question, or at least request for explanation is: What is the shape and structure of the embryo before the HOX genes begin unwinding. What is the shape and structure when the second HOX gene begins acting? Is there a neural tube present at this time? Does the HOX gene start a series of surface tension changes in a single cell that sets off an extrusion?
The most important thing is you now have a general idea of some of the big problems, big questions, and most active areas of inquiry and experimentation in your field.
The problem for you is to continue studying, exploring and developing in one of the areas. Keep a candle of inquiry lit. Keep in mind the information paradox.
I would say, go look at groups doing sciences like astronomy, particle physics, language analysis and chemistry as places where you will find challenges to implement computer science.
Mathematics has also picked up a really interesting open source tool in sage-math. If you are inclined, you can teach yourself advanced computer implemented mathematics with sage-math, such as cryptography. Or implement demos of selected items from Knuth's volume 4.
Now I have questions for you. It seems to me that your formal education has not prepared you to deal with some of the really big situations and problems of the American society. One of my kids just graduated from college and she doesn't have answers either. These questions need to be worked on during your adult life: You are taking up employment in the nation with the largest prisoner population of all time.(see Wikipedia American prison population). This is a real crummy recession, why don't you figure out a fix to the boom bust cycle? (Note, Henry George, American writer, here.) Why are we spending 10 years at warfare and engaging with religious fanatics on their terms? (Note, Martin Luther King, American religious thinker, ignored, here) Why are we using the same patent system that gives us a succession of dying corporate oligopolies?
Who has written the book or article that works out how American patent and copyright law can be brought back to benefiting the people?
One critic a few years ago said that we are living with a "Pre VCR Law in a digital You-Tube age."
So the question I have is, what political group or thinker has a draft of a better more citizen favourable patent and copyright law? Who understands how to get enough elected politicians all moving on patent and copyright law reform?
I think to myself, in the '80's Ralph Nader was talking about problems with American corporate power. And in this current Presidential campaign, Ron Paul simply has a broad brush attack against our law culture and he doesn't speak specifically about patent and copyright reform.
Business method patents, Java litigation, patent notices on websites, $1500 dollar per song penalties, and this sucking film of illegality about every kind of digital device re-purposing really does add up to a pattern of exploitation. All this legal brutality resembles the English trying to prohibit the export of textile and steam engine technology in the 1700's.
Quote from http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/1244
The persistence of cables being crossed and tangled in the simplest computer installation got me studying topology and knot theory.
One book I like is Formal Knot Theory by Kauffman.
The area where crossings and tangles get much simpler is if you organize a single cable into a loop before storing it. If you hold both ends in one hand, then folding the remaining cable becomes a very symmetric process. For coiling a cable, routing successive turns on opposite sides of the plane of the coil does something very interesting, it creates a balanced number of twists in each direction.
On the mess behind my desk. I am at last a member of the let 'er rip and dustbunnies galore group.
In this current down economic climate (referring to the time period 2008 to 2011) neither boards of directors, nor management nor the government looks good.
Sort of incidentally (following on a college education that had about 4 semesters of American history and American culture classes) I have been puzzling about the American corporation and reading the occasional book on the subject. The first thing I feel these books show is that American corporations are creatures caught within the economic and cultural currents of the time. Sorry but I am naming the titles from memory.
The last book on the list is The Decline and Fall of the American Auto Industry, published around 2009 a few months after the General Motors bailout. Here is a book that principally tells the story of the decline of General Motors Corporation with vignettes of decisions and policies forced upon top management and the GM board of directors from about 1970 down to the bailout. These are the years where General Motors could do everything except build a good small car. At the board of directors level, the choices kept being matters of avoiding the more awful.The board of directors finally wound up with a General Manager whose speciality was promising things would be better. The problem that was never ever solved (and still isn't solved in my opinion) is how to make a 4 cylinder engine as good as the 1700 cc Honda (and keep it in production even if it costs a few dollars more.). No board of directors can solve that problem.
The next two corporation books are: My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan (mid 1960's) and the 1950 vintage classic about General Motors, The Concept of the Corporation by Peter Drucker. These books are the classic duo about a big corporation and a really gifted and eloquent Chief Executive Officer. The only problem is both books were written in the middle of a 40 year richest in the world expansion of the mass production automobile. In the present down economy,the same high quality people sitting on the Board and occupying the top management simply do not look as good... no matter what they do.
Regarding your wish for a new way of doing business, I would say look back at the 1980's... The Regan Presidency Years... where job security began to evaporate. That was the era when the conglomerate corporation began to operate. This is when the process of buying up smaller corporations and doing obscene things to their balance sheets and business plans began. A social history of this era up to the present (not focused very clearly on Corporations) is The Great Inflation and It's Aftermath by Samuelson.
So one way of looking for a new way of doing business is to ask, how can we change the economy of scale back so that stable, quality, relatively low profit and low debt Corporations are not subject to being bought up, stripped of their cash, move the manufacturing to contract offshore factories, loaded with debt and resold on the stock market to investors. Recent corporations worthy of study are Sunbeam, Mr. Coffee and Kidde (fire extinguishers).
This product is a really interesting take on the problem of presenting a semiconductor junction electricity generating device to the sun.
I urge you to go to the solyndra.com website and look at the product description.
The design places the solar electric generator in something that looks like a 4 foot long fluorescent lamp tube.
Look at the end cap of the tube, It is a spline that locks the tube against rotation. It looks like the generating unit is a 4 foot tube that snaps into a frame, and the ends of the tube are the electrical output terminals.
I built solar energy collector devices in 1973 and there are a lot of things about the Solyndra design that I like.
The first thing I did in my projects was put the active collector in a tube, and experiment with reflector designs. One reflector was a trough made of Ultracal sculpture plaster with an aluminium foil lining. I modelled parabolas and circles for their focal effectiveness. A second reflector was a Fresnel reflector, the prototype was machined out of aluminium. The ideal would be a sheet of 1 1/2" thick Celotex roof insulation with a reflective aluminium Fresnel reflector embossed in the top layer or attached with a hot wax or melted plastic membrane. That means you are looking at insulated 100 year roof lifetimes where individual panels can be replaced without having to do the entire roof.
The design point I would make is: the common flat plastic and glass solar electric generator panels are clumsy, they are not easy to replace, they can not be opened and repaired, and they are going to be a bear to deal with when they get old, start failing and have to be disturbed to re-roof the house underneath.
The beauty of the tube type solar electric generator is you can replace them individually, They can be disassembled, rebuilt, reloaded with the latest generation of thin film generator, and you can operate your device in an inert gas environment.
An earlier post that the man who started this design, Dr. Chris Gronet, "has transitioned to the role of advisor and consultant." indicates that the current bankruptcy is for wresting ownership of the design into the hands of new investment money.
Another thing that is visible from the product information pages at Solyndra is the company has been trying to both build a semiconductor device, and deliver a proprietary mounting, shipping and installation system around the device and then sell into the very limited market of flat roof industrial buildings.
Notice that the literature says "lightweight and self-ballasting." and it also says rated for hail and 130 mile per hour wind. These phrases indicate a little too much optimism about the realities of mounting stuff on a roof for 25 years.
Besides wresting control, perhaps this bankruptcy is in anticipation of a product replacement request following the hurricane of last week.
Here is a thought: The tube type solar electricity generator needs to become a generic product in it's own right. A long lasting re-roofing solution needs to become a product in it's own right, You buy a thick 100 year rated insulating surface for your existing roof with the thickness and configuration depending on your climate and roof slope. Finally, you get the focusing surface of the new insulating roof moulded or tuned based on your longitude and roof orientation. Then the solar installer screws the tube mounting frames to the roof according to moulded dimples in the custom reflector surface. The generator tubes snap into place and the installation is ready to deliver 600 volts DC.
So what is the point of having a generic tubular solar electricity generator. Note the Solendra product has a liquid filling called an "optical coupling agent". Hey, suppose this liquid (I guess it is kerosene!) is replaced with an optical energy storage fluid? Something that will make the tube generate electricity after the sun goes down. Now you can see some more elegant advantages to a tubular solar energy generating device?
I send my sympathy to Steve Jobs, as with understatement he reveals he is in mortal straits.
The business started by Steve Jobs you can look at as a very pure business strategy play. They sell a computer hardware and software package that is primarily marketed to individuals.
At the onset, I mean the computer club and wire wrap era, there was this giddy excitement at having a CPU, some memory and a way of executing a programmable instruction set that could do any logic in software.
There have been a couple really big forks in the intellectual road since then: The IBM open bus and motherboard, the BSD software release license, the GNU and open source software system, TCP/IP, the Web, the CPU size and speed increase, the memory density increase, the plague of music copyright, the rise of software and business patents as an instrument of oligopoly, and the blocking of web sites by government administrative demand.
You can look at the company Apple and the products it has made and see how the company handled each of these computer developments. For each of these computer developments, Apple has stayed within a very careful framework: Every year Apple has avoided doing anything that allowed their customers to make non-Apple products the central part of their computer use.
An illustration of how Apple has been practising business strategy (as beyond simple design or programming) is the recent appearance of touch screen devices. Part of the strategy was waiting for key surface acoustic wave touch sensor patents to expire and at the same time developing and patenting software that worked with the patent expired technology. Remember Apple briefly included a USB wand touch pad with IMac laptops around 2004 ? (I guess) They added these gadgets to facilitate development of patentable display software.
So I look at Apple as having played a consistent business chess game. Their customer has been the individual and the business activity has been to recapture the customer over and over. Now those incredible stock prices, that is because Apple succeeds in charging a $40 to $200 per unit retail premium.
The real revolution is still open source software running on generic hardware using an open Web and serving peaceful human needs. It is interesting and elegant, that as closed as Apple computer hardware may be, their machinery still does many of the things one might wish of an ethically and socially ideal computer.
Well I just spent this weekend trying to find some neat physics to pep up my interest in amateur radio.
I am also angling to pep up my resume so I can wiggle into a job where there is a particle accelerator.
Here is an introduction to quantum physics with an emphasis on modern gadgets that use quantum phenomena.
http://www.colorado.edu/physics/2000/index.pl?Type=TOC
Here is a pretty reasonable home quantum physics project.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Homemade-Quantum-Laser-Micrometer-Nestors-Microm/?ALLSTEPS
An introduction to the Planck Constant and emission spectra.
http://www.radio-astronomy.org/educ/tutor2.htm
As I master the math, I plan to write my own tutorial and computation scripts using this tool.
http://sagemath.org/
I am going to reflect on the original post with a viewpoint that focuses back thirty-nine years to 1972.
That was the year Nixon went to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) and HP introduced the electronic slide rule calculator model HP-35. I was freshly graduated from college working in the machine shop of a small packaging machinery manufacturer.
That year I was offered a three unit residential property on an 100 x 100 lot in the Mount Washington district of Los Angeles for $72,000. My Dad said "the pipes are bad" and wouldn't help me buy the property. Within a year, I had been kicked out of my cheap rent cabin on this same property. The property quickly changed hands and began rising in value.
So I date 1972 as the start of steady aggressive real estate value increase, at least in California. I was an early baby boomer and real estate prices were racing ahead of me.
Meanwhile, regarding the Nixon trip to China, this is a starting date where Chinese land values, real estate values and rate-of-pay for labor had been reset by the Communist revolution.
So here is the view I propose: Starting about 40 years ago, the cost of land, industrial buildings, residential homes and apartments has been going up in the United States. Meanwhile, the People's Republic of China, thanks to the Communist revolution, had an enormous "land and real-estate value reset" that has kept land and real estate cheap for much longer than 1972.
The huge difference in land and real estate value means it costs a lot more to live in the United States than in China.
These facts are the financial basis for why it costs a lot less to make things in the PRC than in the USA.
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In the decade around 1982, in America there was a perception of a Japanese manufacturing assault on America. What became of the Japanese business success of those years? In Japan there was an epidemic of real estate speculation. At one time Tokyo floor space sold for $1,000 per square foot. One of the effects noted has been 20 years of stagflation. The Japanese economy did not recover after several years of Keynesian spending on public works projects.
For instance, eight years ago the water pump in the Japanese engine in my Dodge Caravan was made in Japan. Another water pump for the same car bought one year ago (in 2010) was manufactured in China. Yet another well established manufacturing job moved to China.
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So what to do? I am presently reading Progress and Poverty by the American economic thinker Henry George. He did a classic economic analysis of American capitalism in 1890. Yes he was within a few decades of being a contemporary of Carl Marx. One point I note is he identifies the activity of buying and selling real estate for a profit as not a part of capitalism per se.
This report of the sale of Instructables to Autodesk makes it clear to me that the free software community needs a common drawing data structure and a set of user drawing interchange utilities.
The world of free drafting and CAD doesn't have the many little component drawings available to the users of AutoCAD proprietary drafting software. From the previous poster's comments, AutoDesk is unlikely to make any user data files or data structure information more available in the future.
I just finished spending 2 months reviewing many of the free CAD programs. I am looking for programs and applications to design a solar water heater installation, a radio antenna, a fractal made out of wire, an electrical circuit and a wagon. Is there anything yet to match sheets of quad paper, a .5 mm mechanical pencil and a HP-48 calculator and some assorted handbooks?
What AutoDesk seems to have, that is never released by AutoDesk, is the Autocad user drawing data structure and the little drawings of ready to use components.
What is missing from PythonCAD, Qcad, Blender, and Varkon is libraries of little drawings called "components". (An interesting program is the Beta prototype "Fritzing" for designing Arduino breadboards. Fritzing is all about placing components and drawing wires between the components. It has a delightful simple data structure for doing this.)
The whole world of CAD or mechanical drafting programs is wrapped up in incompatible islands of proprietary user drawing data structures. It seems to spring from business based engineers who want to be paid directly for every single use of their engineering knowledge.
Since it is partly free and it does run on Linux (with Wine), I like Google Sketchup. The drawing app is genius, the user data structure is proprietary and the data can be exported only using the $500 professional version of Sketchup. I wish they would publish their user data structure.
It would be both fun and a first class challenge to write conversion utilities to convert files from Sketchup to Blender, from Sketchup to PythonCAD and Qcad. From the CAD programs back and forth to SAGE and Xnec2c. Here is an interesting problem in doing user data structure conversions: When doing the file conversion, you need a way to not throw away data that one program uses and another doesn't. One way is to provide for internal comments within the user application data structure for each drawing application. And figure out how to keep each comment together with some active point within the data structure.
The problem with the story is the happy little song at the end.
The story attempts to resolve the menace of the Stuxnet worm by suggesting that Iran now knows how to avoid another worm infection.
The competing conclusion is an exceptional piece of software has been described at the design level.
The remaining part of the puzzle is: Did the researchers figure out what linker and what compiler was used to build the darn thing? Have they determined the programming language used from the patterns of data and code? Are the sections of the worm static and fixed in size or are the sizes variable and reached by means of a jump table? Are there pieces of assembly language code present? Does the code have assembly language sequences designed to derail a debugger? Does the worm design show size and configuration changes as the production worm was tweaked?
Finally, are any of the zero day exploits mentioned the result of actions below the level of the operating system? In effect, are there hardware level exploits that can affect any IBM compatible personal computer no matter what operating system it runs? The mention of a computer that repeatedly reboots at the beginning of the article might be just the symptom of the super duper ultra low level exploit, if it exists.