And Bill Gates has said this new OS is going to be the whing dinger of all time.
Meaning, the number of serious holes is going to be astonishing, because they are so sophisticated and well hidden that only the best hackers can find and exploit them without users and IT admins finding them.
"Perelman now seems to be the favorite to receive a Fields Medal at the International Mathematics Union meeting next week, but it's not clear that he'll even show up!"
The curse of the gifted is that niggling worry in the back of the mind that if one accepts praise, one may lose his focus, drive or muse, if you will.
I think the person writing the article has never been inside a product development team where you have to worry about what your competitor learns about your VALUABLE CREATIVE future products!
If you had your Big Gates competitor near ready to put out his first major OS release (in 5 years) & it is due to launch within 6 months, and you are describing the "Next Hottee"at Monday Aug 7 @ 10am, you can bet Billy would have a new software team on any key feature he wanted to add to Vista, by Tuesday, August 8, 2006 at 8 AM at the latest.
I fully respect Jobs skills at manipulating the PR to make Apple work. He has done it arguably better than anyone else over the last 7 years or so, in spite of so many voluble critics, and shown them all wrong.
And "gaunt". You really want Gates to look like the balloon who just retired from Exxon? Give us a break here. Carrying around extra weight is a NEGATIVE.
Then because I cannot risk ANY downtime or corruption, I never connect to a network or internet with a mission critical computer running Microsoft OS, and suddenly it decides I need to 'validate' the OS by going on the Internet, or it will maybe decide I have pirated the OS?
So just how secure do you think most corporations are to intrusions by intensively competitive foreign firms, like, shall we say those from Korea (Both), China, Taiwan and others, who have already figured out what college students (including the foreign students) had figured out 10 years before during their undergraduate work?
That is where the best use of a "knowledge base" to imbed the best minds' knowledge in a computer can be used to help out eliminating tedium and lengthy page by page hand tallied results by a doctor.
That lets the doctor get to range of possible problems & solutions more quickly.
Unfortunately, we are barely now graduating the first doctors who have now lived their whole school experience with computers and are comfortable with them, and then there is the constant upgrades and training and cost. Lots of doctors won't keep up. Going to take awhile longer than anticipated, by my guess.
If a physical therapist can recommend and watch over some other forms of excercise, you can start to balance out and strengthen other muscles and possibly attentuate or eliminate the problems. It did work for me, though I realize if it gets bad enough that it is difficult to get over.
Government and the general public education system (arguably = Government at this point) are arguably the slowest and least likely to "keep up" with changes in society and technology.
Because career employees in the "Public Service Sector" function almost as Tenured Professors's, virtually by design, there is little way to make government entities "perk up", as you can't get rid of positions or employees who are not keeping up. Solution = add more departments (more tax dollars).
There have been debacles with the IRS computer system, no computer system of note at the FBI, no interacting computer systems amongst security agencies, and now State Department web site hacking and military members' personal data stolen.
Some times it takes a revolution to get progress. I hope the revolution starts at the ballet box, not the bullet box like the Middle East. Hopefully our U.S. Federal Government figures out how to safely store things, whether it is the National Archives or the Nuclear Archives. Geesh!
The rest of us innovate and change, but then others complain again.
Progress happens. A perfect example is water. One of the latest use of carbon nanotubes is to act as a perfectly calibrated microporous desalinization and purefication system. A recent university demonstration of the prototype filter pointed to being able to likely lower the cost of desalinization by half.
Electricity can run 80-90% of the cars in the country and the electricity can be produced by nuclear powerplants with minimal impact. The electric distribution is in place to distribute electricity nationwide. Batteries have doubled their efficiency in power per unit volume over less than a decade, and are continuing.
Smaller devices that consumers use are the norm, along with recycyling. That puts less strain on materials supplies.
Man collectively has no choice but to innovate. There is no way that the innvations can be spread equally across the planet, as various governments have structured their systems to limit education, growth, and the acceptance of new methods in many ways.
Innovation is not just a choice; it is the ONLY choice.
Over 60% of kids surveyed recently noted that computers were indispensible in their life and used them accordingly. (UK story on Drudgereport.com yesterday noted this)
TV's were rated indispensible by something around 40% and dropping.
Networks are BEHIND THE CURVE, & still trying to save the sales of buggy whips.
Time for a mass cleanout of Network Execs, to be replaced by people who have grown up with computers, as the new era is already here.
Re:That was actually surprisingly good article
on
The Cost of the iPod
·
· Score: 1
There is at least one company that specializes in selling competitive information on electronic products.
They rip apart the first iPods they purchased (every one of the models) and document every component and its cost, and for a few thousands of dollars they will sell you the reverse engineering report on any iPod you want.
That is called "independent verification" of competitive information.
A standard "old" drafting table has stood the test of time with a drafting chair with the various adjustments.
It allows sit on the chair mode, one leg on the floor or two, or stand up, and thus gives a lot of different positions to use during a day.
As others have noted, I found I needed to specifically keep my excersize up and chose both moderate speed walking and rowing to keep everything else greased up. Just don't overdo the rowing effort, as you can easily put too much load on your back, without realizing it is your weakest point.
Whether someone in government deliberately or accidentally leaves the barn door open and all SS#s and data gets blown out into the public, getting "justice" would be moot. Suppose a bribed employee takes $25 million from Kim Jung Il for the records?
You can NOT sue the Feds without an act of Congress. Congress has shown little tendency to hold government liable even when there is gross negligence.
Furthermore, I seriously doubt that the Feds have an alternate backup system to put in place if that happens. I doubt corporate data centers are preparing for the day that other ID is mandatory to verify who they are dealing with, but they should be planning for what is inevitable.
Biometric verification may well be the only way to stop identity theft, yet a lot of naysayers worrying about "big government" have failed to see we already have incompetent big government, and something needs to be done that puts the power back with the individual. A biometric could be any one of say 3 items, Iris, Finger-blood vessel, & Facial, and anyone seeking to use a financial transaction simply has to get his eye, finger, or face scanned.
It is pretty obvious that the best cell phone I ever had was the old original large Motorola flip phone from the early 90s. The were durable, dependable, DISPLAY was bright & readable anytime (one line red LEDs), Didn't have to take the phone apart to change the battery, Didn't freeze up, & were great.
Now Cingular and the others want to "sell" you a new phone-contract deal virtually every time that you enter the store, meaning they are looking at the whizzy phones as a major profit center (remember the circular dial push button pad, Nokia, was it?).
They WANT you to throw away the "old" phone each year.
I wonder who is going to get smart first. Cell phone hardware companies will see their yearly sales plummet if they actually start turning out solid, reliable, basic long lived products.
"Feel free to enjoy your safety and complacency and keep evangelising Macs as much as you like but don't forget that you can inadvertantly pass on infections that you receive and damage other people's computers. Viruses are not a threat you can ignore just because you own a Mac."
I am not complacent and have not yet passed on a virus.
I also use my PCs every day, just not on the Internet, and indeed I keep the virus scanning on and firewalls up along with updates, even though my PC is not on the internet (except for an update which I can't easily install any other way).
These continuing major XP Pro & MSOffice foulups due to POOR PROGRAMMING & EXPLOIT TESTING, are simply inexcusible, though, in my opinion.
...when I tell them, that my Mac OSX laptop is the CHEAPEST form of absolute insurance against the MS EULA protected gross safety problems of MS's XP Pro & MS Office.
They do critical MSWord docs back and for with clients and the FDA in Wash. D.C. all day long, and I really don't think they accept how risky this is today, particularly if a document comes in forwarded from a reliable source that has had the malicious RootKit somehow patched onto an other wise legitimate document that they need to file with the FDA.
Of course that makes me wonder how the FDA handles a malicious MS Word document. They are no different than anyone else in receiving zero day exploits.
Each time a zero day or other serious problem hits, I remind them, but they are literally afraid of having to learn something new, & so stick with the MS offerings.
Hydrogen is Just an Energy Storage Medium
on
"H-Prize" Announced
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Hydrogen is not a solution unto itself, as it is an energy storage medium, much as a battery is an energy storage medium.
Hydrogen still has to be procured from:
1. Natural gas
2. Bio-mass
3. Electrolysis of water
4. Ethanol, etc.
Hydrogen then has to be stored or transported & then stored:
1. At high pressure inside of highly stressed tanks (many thousands of psi) or
2. In tanks with metal hydride structures or similar at lower pressures
Hydrogen then has to be transported in a system we don't currently have in place:
1. In underground moderate pressure pipes
2. In higher pressure tank trucks in some areas
The cost and time necessary to implement the whole building project to store and deliver the Hydrogen system above is immense, as none of it is in place NOW.
The cost of delivering equivalent amounts of energy to EVERY CITY in the U.S. right now is already in place. It is called the electric grid.
Power Plants (regardless of the type of basic fuel or energy source, coal, hydro, nuclear) are not only large but thermally VERY efficient (about 3 times as efficent at "burning" fuel as an internal combustion engine).
Thus in the end there are lots of tradeoffs, and these have been endlessly analyzed in the private & public and university sectors.
Hydrogen does not seem like a cost effective method when the infrastructure costs and times are looked at realistically, otherwise a company would have started doing it to make money already. Politically it looks interesting for votes.
Super efficient, cost effective batteries may be the only reasonable way to tap into the power of the national electric grid and provide effectively delivered "power" to automobiles of the future. That may be why there are so many dozens of labs in the U.S. alone attempting to perfect more efficient more cost effective batteries.
Politics rarely leads the pack in inventive matters.
Many download sites make you click "Accept" buttons, but if you actually try to READ the damned 15-25 pages of the EULA, you find the web site "times out" and you can't then proceed with the purchase/registration process.
No wonder people don't read them. I don't do it online anymore.
I can also see using Virtualization installs of Windows, when some dastardly web programmer makes a web page simply not function except with IE, and I want to flip to Windows for a minute or two.
Slashdot Mirror
And Bill Gates has said this new OS is going to be the whing dinger of all time.
Meaning, the number of serious holes is going to be astonishing, because they are so sophisticated and well hidden that only the best hackers can find and exploit them without users and IT admins finding them.
Aaaaak
Basics First: Energy Out = Energy In (from somewhere) thus;
For the device to have Energy Out, energy must be taken from somewhere else.
In normal terms this means a temperature drop from the area where the Energy comes from.
Very, very easy to measure.
"Is this an appropriate penalty for releasing 20 million keyword search results, or is it too harsh, or not harsh enough?"
Nothing deters slacking off on one's duties better than severe punishment.
She would probably rather be drawn and quartered than face 600,000 AOL users.
Come to think of it, I could see her changing her name.
"Perelman now seems to be the favorite to receive a Fields Medal at the International Mathematics Union meeting next week, but it's not clear that he'll even show up!"
The curse of the gifted is that niggling worry in the back of the mind that if one accepts praise, one may lose his focus, drive or muse, if you will.
I think the person writing the article has never been inside a product development team where you have to worry about what your competitor learns about your VALUABLE CREATIVE future products!
If you had your Big Gates competitor near ready to put out his first major OS release (in 5 years) & it is due to launch within 6 months, and you are describing the "Next Hottee"at Monday Aug 7 @ 10am, you can bet Billy would have a new software team on any key feature he wanted to add to Vista, by Tuesday, August 8, 2006 at 8 AM at the latest.
I fully respect Jobs skills at manipulating the PR to make Apple work. He has done it arguably better than anyone else over the last 7 years or so, in spite of so many voluble critics, and shown them all wrong.
And "gaunt". You really want Gates to look like the balloon who just retired from Exxon? Give us a break here. Carrying around extra weight is a NEGATIVE.
One year from now, the truth will be known.
Then because I cannot risk ANY downtime or corruption, I never connect to a network or internet with a mission critical computer running Microsoft OS, and suddenly it decides I need to 'validate' the OS by going on the Internet, or it will maybe decide I have pirated the OS?
Bull crap! And that is putting it lightly.
So just how secure do you think most corporations are to intrusions by intensively competitive foreign firms, like, shall we say those from Korea (Both), China, Taiwan and others, who have already figured out what college students (including the foreign students) had figured out 10 years before during their undergraduate work?
That is where the best use of a "knowledge base" to imbed the best minds' knowledge in a computer can be used to help out eliminating tedium and lengthy page by page hand tallied results by a doctor.
That lets the doctor get to range of possible problems & solutions more quickly.
Unfortunately, we are barely now graduating the first doctors who have now lived their whole school experience with computers and are comfortable with them, and then there is the constant upgrades and training and cost. Lots of doctors won't keep up. Going to take awhile longer than anticipated, by my guess.
Tis certainly part of the problem.
If a physical therapist can recommend and watch over some other forms of excercise, you can start to balance out and strengthen other muscles and possibly attentuate or eliminate the problems. It did work for me, though I realize if it gets bad enough that it is difficult to get over.
Government and the general public education system (arguably = Government at this point) are arguably the slowest and least likely to "keep up" with changes in society and technology.
Because career employees in the "Public Service Sector" function almost as Tenured Professors's, virtually by design, there is little way to make government entities "perk up", as you can't get rid of positions or employees who are not keeping up. Solution = add more departments (more tax dollars).
There have been debacles with the IRS computer system, no computer system of note at the FBI, no interacting computer systems amongst security agencies, and now State Department web site hacking and military members' personal data stolen.
Some times it takes a revolution to get progress. I hope the revolution starts at the ballet box, not the bullet box like the Middle East. Hopefully our U.S. Federal Government figures out how to safely store things, whether it is the National Archives or the Nuclear Archives. Geesh!
Naysayers make their livings writting books.
The rest of us innovate and change, but then others complain again.
Progress happens. A perfect example is water. One of the latest use of carbon nanotubes is to act as a perfectly calibrated microporous desalinization and purefication system. A recent university demonstration of the prototype filter pointed to being able to likely lower the cost of desalinization by half.
Electricity can run 80-90% of the cars in the country and the electricity can be produced by nuclear powerplants with minimal impact. The electric distribution is in place to distribute electricity nationwide. Batteries have doubled their efficiency in power per unit volume over less than a decade, and are continuing.
Smaller devices that consumers use are the norm, along with recycyling. That puts less strain on materials supplies.
Man collectively has no choice but to innovate. There is no way that the innvations can be spread equally across the planet, as various governments have structured their systems to limit education, growth, and the acceptance of new methods in many ways.
Innovation is not just a choice; it is the ONLY choice.
Over 60% of kids surveyed recently noted that computers were indispensible in their life and used them accordingly. (UK story on Drudgereport.com yesterday noted this)
TV's were rated indispensible by something around 40% and dropping.
Networks are BEHIND THE CURVE, & still trying to save the sales of buggy whips.
Time for a mass cleanout of Network Execs, to be replaced by people who have grown up with computers, as the new era is already here.
There is at least one company that specializes in selling competitive information on electronic products.
They rip apart the first iPods they purchased (every one of the models) and document every component and its cost, and for a few thousands of dollars they will sell you the reverse engineering report on any iPod you want.
That is called "independent verification" of competitive information.
A standard "old" drafting table has stood the test of time with a drafting chair with the various adjustments.
It allows sit on the chair mode, one leg on the floor or two, or stand up, and thus gives a lot of different positions to use during a day.
As others have noted, I found I needed to specifically keep my excersize up and chose both moderate speed walking and rowing to keep everything else greased up. Just don't overdo the rowing effort, as you can easily put too much load on your back, without realizing it is your weakest point.
Whether someone in government deliberately or accidentally leaves the barn door open and all SS#s and data gets blown out into the public, getting "justice" would be moot. Suppose a bribed employee takes $25 million from Kim Jung Il for the records?
You can NOT sue the Feds without an act of Congress. Congress has shown little tendency to hold government liable even when there is gross negligence.
Furthermore, I seriously doubt that the Feds have an alternate backup system to put in place if that happens. I doubt corporate data centers are preparing for the day that other ID is mandatory to verify who they are dealing with, but they should be planning for what is inevitable.
Biometric verification may well be the only way to stop identity theft, yet a lot of naysayers worrying about "big government" have failed to see we already have incompetent big government, and something needs to be done that puts the power back with the individual. A biometric could be any one of say 3 items, Iris, Finger-blood vessel, & Facial, and anyone seeking to use a financial transaction simply has to get his eye, finger, or face scanned.
It is pretty obvious that the best cell phone I ever had was the old original large Motorola flip phone from the early 90s. The were durable, dependable, DISPLAY was bright & readable anytime (one line red LEDs), Didn't have to take the phone apart to change the battery, Didn't freeze up, & were great.
Now Cingular and the others want to "sell" you a new phone-contract deal virtually every time that you enter the store, meaning they are looking at the whizzy phones as a major profit center (remember the circular dial push button pad, Nokia, was it?).
They WANT you to throw away the "old" phone each year.
I wonder who is going to get smart first. Cell phone hardware companies will see their yearly sales plummet if they actually start turning out solid, reliable, basic long lived products.
That of not only protection but saving the time wasting recovery from infections?
I don't know the answer on that one.
"Feel free to enjoy your safety and complacency and keep evangelising Macs as much as you like but don't forget that you can inadvertantly pass on infections that you receive and damage other people's computers. Viruses are not a threat you can ignore just because you own a Mac."
I am not complacent and have not yet passed on a virus.
I also use my PCs every day, just not on the Internet, and indeed I keep the virus scanning on and firewalls up along with updates, even though my PC is not on the internet (except for an update which I can't easily install any other way).
These continuing major XP Pro & MSOffice foulups due to POOR PROGRAMMING & EXPLOIT TESTING, are simply inexcusible, though, in my opinion.
...when I tell them, that my Mac OSX laptop is the CHEAPEST form of absolute insurance against the MS EULA protected gross safety problems of MS's XP Pro & MS Office.
They do critical MSWord docs back and for with clients and the FDA in Wash. D.C. all day long, and I really don't think they accept how risky this is today, particularly if a document comes in forwarded from a reliable source that has had the malicious RootKit somehow patched onto an other wise legitimate document that they need to file with the FDA.
Of course that makes me wonder how the FDA handles a malicious MS Word document. They are no different than anyone else in receiving zero day exploits.
Each time a zero day or other serious problem hits, I remind them, but they are literally afraid of having to learn something new, & so stick with the MS offerings.
Hydrogen is not a solution unto itself, as it is an energy storage medium, much as a battery is an energy storage medium. Hydrogen still has to be procured from: 1. Natural gas 2. Bio-mass 3. Electrolysis of water 4. Ethanol, etc. Hydrogen then has to be stored or transported & then stored: 1. At high pressure inside of highly stressed tanks (many thousands of psi) or 2. In tanks with metal hydride structures or similar at lower pressures Hydrogen then has to be transported in a system we don't currently have in place: 1. In underground moderate pressure pipes 2. In higher pressure tank trucks in some areas The cost and time necessary to implement the whole building project to store and deliver the Hydrogen system above is immense, as none of it is in place NOW. The cost of delivering equivalent amounts of energy to EVERY CITY in the U.S. right now is already in place. It is called the electric grid. Power Plants (regardless of the type of basic fuel or energy source, coal, hydro, nuclear) are not only large but thermally VERY efficient (about 3 times as efficent at "burning" fuel as an internal combustion engine). Thus in the end there are lots of tradeoffs, and these have been endlessly analyzed in the private & public and university sectors. Hydrogen does not seem like a cost effective method when the infrastructure costs and times are looked at realistically, otherwise a company would have started doing it to make money already. Politically it looks interesting for votes. Super efficient, cost effective batteries may be the only reasonable way to tap into the power of the national electric grid and provide effectively delivered "power" to automobiles of the future. That may be why there are so many dozens of labs in the U.S. alone attempting to perfect more efficient more cost effective batteries. Politics rarely leads the pack in inventive matters.
The Microsoft attitude to "do it all" and never retreat is how I view their attitude in attempting to be all for all PC users.
That leads to a tunnel vision in a bizarre way that doesn't allow rational business analysis to proceed and get carried out in practice.
It also leads them to litigation (read Bill's father's advice), when settlement would often be the wisest choice
Casablanca is STILL one of the top dozen or two dozen movies of all time, and people still buy the DVDs.
Good Shakespear and good games are no different.
Many download sites make you click "Accept" buttons, but if you actually try to READ the damned 15-25 pages of the EULA, you find the web site "times out" and you can't then proceed with the purchase/registration process.
No wonder people don't read them. I don't do it online anymore.
I can also see using Virtualization installs of Windows, when some dastardly web programmer makes a web page simply not function except with IE, and I want to flip to Windows for a minute or two.
Smiling: I was, of course, using "virtually" in the non-computer sense. Interesting how words twist as they move from one arena to another in life.