I ride BART several times a week, and completely agree its current state is parlous. However a few factoids (some dredged up from memory as they pre-date the modern internet):
1) Indian Gauge: I have heard the motivation was primarily stability in the event of a major earthquake occurring during e.g. rush hour
2) antiquated controller system: at least one attempt was made to upgrade it, during the 80's. One of the companies was a software contractor Logica (sp?). It was a classic large-systems cluster: over budget, late, never worked, subsequent litigation. I believe the original system used Westinghouse computers and at one time the number of trains during peak hours was limited by RAM exhaustion (measured in KB IIRC, might have still been magnetic core that far back)
3) the current problems have surfaced in part because they waited too long to replace the fleet; new cars not showing up until 2017 and they really were needed a year or two ago.
4) Aside from lack of maintenance (very real), a good argument can be made CapEx has been misdirected. Some alternatives to going south of Fremont that would have been more useful: removing SPOF at Oakland Wye; going out Geary (allegedly the busiest transit corridor in USA without rail); crossing the bay roughly where Dumbarton Bridge is. Alas the funding model for BART (and various intra- and inter-county rivalries) make all these political non-starters.
5) could be worse... consider any sprawly sunbelt city.
You are like someone trying to start a restaurant who is asking the web for advice on the menu when you should be focusing how good the location is and the rent.
Your lack of business acumen (even compared to your technical expertise!) is what is going to kill you. Is your idea anything more compelling than getting hits on pages decorated with adsense crap?
On the evidence you're going to get fucked either way. LAMP is probably the better bet but if you go into the cloud you'll be paying for those clicks: dearly if only a small percentage are revenue generating. MSFT is not necessarily inferior technically, but it's targeted at Enterprises with deep pockets, not 1-person startups: you will go broke with the up-front costs.
Don't let me stand in the way of your dislike of Apple... my point was evolving handheld technology tends to become quickly available to all manufacturers, so many spec advantages are transient.
As for PowerPC, in retrospect that would be judged a failed strategy. Those machines were never price or performance competitive, and served to marginalize the platform. And all because (legend has it) Intel pissed off Jobs in the 80's and he held the grudge for 20 years.
The market will decide iPhone vs Android, but there's another reason "specmanship" is pointless. It is a leapfrog game for things like screen size, memory, etc. The Android phones came out nearly half a year later than 3GS... do you really think the next iPhone won't likewise advance? Ditto for RiM, Palm (if they stay in business), etc. For the most part other companies are developing the most fundamental technologies, and handheld manufacturersare just riding the curves.
The New Yorker is legendary in the publishing industry for hyper-diligent fact-checking bordering on paranoia. AFAIK they have never had a Jason Blair situation, nor do I recall them ever publishing a retraction in the quarter-century or so I've been reading it. They even fact check their cartoons! If this brouhaha actually progresses to the courtroom, this will be as big a story as the alleged trasgression itself.
For many years I worked in an office building that hosted one of these signs, and happened to be going to lunch one day when the owner was giving a tour of the control room. I quietly joined the group and learned a bit about this system. It may or may not be relevant to other signs:
content system was crude: a PC running a browser in full-screen mode, the billboards driven straight from VGA output
In California, this particular size sign (big) was constrained by the CHP to show only still pictures 5 seconds at a time to minimize distraction. Apparently smaller signs (e.g. the ones by Great America, Serramonte, etc.) can show motion video
Also to keep CHP happy, light sensors to dim the billboard when it got dark outside.
There were video cameras pointed at each billboard to detect hardware failures (lots of stuck pixels in the early days), and also hacking.
the control room was behind a locked, alarmed door, images were downloaded remotely to the PC.
the signs are very lucrative, $12M/yr revenue was quoted for this one.
when my presence was detected, the guy giving the preso got really pissed and ordered my out.
Although it represents progress that Congress has become sensitized to privacy issues, it's a little early to declare victory. Congress is also considering legislation to impose weak national standards for protecting information collected by companies, and preventing states from imposing stronger standards (e.g. gutting the recently passed California data privacy law). Unlike DNC, this legislation is likely to pass, and methinks many politicians will use their DNC vote as protective coloration hoping nobody notices their caving on the arguably more important issue if data privacy.
...more or less what several people on the wrong end of that bet said. At the risk of further taxing/.'s lugging servers, a slight clarification. The program in question used a (fairly poor) adaptive algorithm, a fact I knew and exploited (computers in the late 70's weren't quite up to brute force approach). My point was only that complex algorithms can be influenced in non-obvious ways by their environment, and this will sooner or later be exploited nefariously.
The flip side to your observation is the familiar GIGO scenario. As a college student, I won a bet that I could beat a tic-tac-toe program. I did so by playing several bad games in a row, letting the computer win but teaching it bad habits. After about a dozen games I set up a pin that the poor thing was totally unprepared for. The abuses of any technology are proportional to its strength. The perversions of computerized cognition, in the hands of financial advisors or politicians, will be particularly noxious.
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I ride BART several times a week, and completely agree its current state is parlous. However a few factoids (some dredged up from memory as they pre-date the modern internet):
1) Indian Gauge: I have heard the motivation was primarily stability in the event of a major earthquake occurring during e.g. rush hour
2) antiquated controller system: at least one attempt was made to upgrade it, during the 80's. One of the companies was a software contractor Logica (sp?). It was a classic large-systems cluster: over budget, late, never worked, subsequent litigation. I believe the original system used Westinghouse computers and at one time the number of trains during peak hours was limited by RAM exhaustion (measured in KB IIRC, might have still been magnetic core that far back)
3) the current problems have surfaced in part because they waited too long to replace the fleet; new cars not showing up until 2017 and they really were needed a year or two ago.
4) Aside from lack of maintenance (very real), a good argument can be made CapEx has been misdirected. Some alternatives to going south of Fremont that would have been more useful: removing SPOF at Oakland Wye; going out Geary (allegedly the busiest transit corridor in USA without rail); crossing the bay roughly where Dumbarton Bridge is. Alas the funding model for BART (and various intra- and inter-county rivalries) make all these political non-starters.
5) could be worse... consider any sprawly sunbelt city.
Perhaps coincidence, but News Corp is selling its stake in NDS to Cisco, whose pockets are certainly deep enough to attract litigation.
You are like someone trying to start a restaurant who is asking the web for advice on the menu when you should be focusing how good the location is and the rent. Your lack of business acumen (even compared to your technical expertise!) is what is going to kill you. Is your idea anything more compelling than getting hits on pages decorated with adsense crap? On the evidence you're going to get fucked either way. LAMP is probably the better bet but if you go into the cloud you'll be paying for those clicks: dearly if only a small percentage are revenue generating. MSFT is not necessarily inferior technically, but it's targeted at Enterprises with deep pockets, not 1-person startups: you will go broke with the up-front costs.
Don't let me stand in the way of your dislike of Apple... my point was evolving handheld technology tends to become quickly available to all manufacturers, so many spec advantages are transient. As for PowerPC, in retrospect that would be judged a failed strategy. Those machines were never price or performance competitive, and served to marginalize the platform. And all because (legend has it) Intel pissed off Jobs in the 80's and he held the grudge for 20 years.
The market will decide iPhone vs Android, but there's another reason "specmanship" is pointless. It is a leapfrog game for things like screen size, memory, etc. The Android phones came out nearly half a year later than 3GS... do you really think the next iPhone won't likewise advance? Ditto for RiM, Palm (if they stay in business), etc. For the most part other companies are developing the most fundamental technologies, and handheld manufacturersare just riding the curves.
...only let them read the San Francisco Chronicle
This is what Zuckerberg should be having nightmares about. http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_17/b3626167.ht m
The New Yorker is legendary in the publishing industry for hyper-diligent fact-checking bordering on paranoia. AFAIK they have never had a Jason Blair situation, nor do I recall them ever publishing a retraction in the quarter-century or so I've been reading it. They even fact check their cartoons! If this brouhaha actually progresses to the courtroom, this will be as big a story as the alleged trasgression itself.
older than that even, John Brunner predicted the rise of the prediction biz several decades ago, in his now sadly neglected novel Shockwave Rider: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=661
content system was crude: a PC running a browser in full-screen mode, the billboards driven straight from VGA output
In California, this particular size sign (big) was constrained by the CHP to show only still pictures 5 seconds at a time to minimize distraction. Apparently smaller signs (e.g. the ones by Great America, Serramonte, etc.) can show motion video
Also to keep CHP happy, light sensors to dim the billboard when it got dark outside.
There were video cameras pointed at each billboard to detect hardware failures (lots of stuck pixels in the early days), and also hacking.
the control room was behind a locked, alarmed door, images were downloaded remotely to the PC.
the signs are very lucrative, $12M/yr revenue was quoted for this one.
when my presence was detected, the guy giving the preso got really pissed and ordered my out.
Although it represents progress that Congress has become sensitized to privacy issues, it's a little early to declare victory. Congress is also considering legislation to impose weak national standards for protecting information collected by companies, and preventing states from imposing stronger standards (e.g. gutting the recently passed California data privacy law). Unlike DNC, this legislation is likely to pass, and methinks many politicians will use their DNC vote as protective coloration hoping nobody notices their caving on the arguably more important issue if data privacy.
...more or less what several people on the wrong end of that bet said. At the risk of further taxing /.'s lugging servers, a slight clarification. The program in question used a (fairly poor) adaptive algorithm, a fact I knew and exploited (computers in the late 70's weren't quite up to brute force approach). My point was only that complex algorithms can be influenced in non-obvious ways by their environment, and this will sooner or later be exploited nefariously.
The flip side to your observation is the familiar GIGO scenario. As a college student, I won a bet that I could beat a tic-tac-toe program. I did so by playing several bad games in a row, letting the computer win but teaching it bad habits. After about a dozen games I set up a pin that the poor thing was totally unprepared for. The abuses of any technology are proportional to its strength. The perversions of computerized cognition, in the hands of financial advisors or politicians, will be particularly noxious.