One Company Owning A PTP Network?
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Scour is Dead
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· Score: 2
"Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?"
What it illustrates is that, given intellectual property issues, is that it is very difficult for one company to own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. A company which had the inclination and resources to exert reasonable editorial controls over the content - say an AOL or a distributed version of Geocities or some similar notion - could certainly operate a PTP network in a similar manner to how non PTP communities with regulation of content and checks against IP infringement are operated.
In terms of open PTP networks, what one company, or a consortium, can do is to promote open standards and design recommendations in order to facilitate a global network of file-sharing (and in the case of my company's WebWorld project, also processor-sharing a'la SETI@Home). A modular design to allow to plug-in other protocols is also probably a good idea, since we don't yet know what standards may emerge and survive;-)
The centralized notion leaves a single company vulnerable to control abuses, whereas by providing a technology and not a service one gives the responsibility over to the members of the network. However, it is unclear why services like Napster have not yet succeeded in the argument that like an unedited BBS they are just a repository, not a publishing/editorial board with a responsibility to prevent abuse. (If someone knows the details of this legal area, please post.)
Very good points! Controlled de-orbiting of MIR poses no signifigant threat to life on earth (less than normal meteor activity, since meteors are generally not so kind as to aim for the deep ocean), the mold is not "space mold" and will not pollute the earth or grow into space monsters, and it is indeed sad to close this chapter of space history... but I hope the ISS is opening an exciting new chapter.
I would also like to add that the Russians having contributed so greatly to space exploration should continue to be invited to participate in internation space exploration efforts.
While some people like to make fun of MIR, for many years I didn't see any other countries with orbital space stations - falling apart or otherwise. It is sad that MIR will have to be destroyed, and can not be boosted into a safe parking orbit, but let's hope the International Space Station will be an even bigger success and that renewed interest in manned space exploration will manage to resurface without the cold war posturing to drive it.
If you want to support manned space exploration, you can check out:
http://planetary.org
http://thinkmars.net/
http://www.nss.org/
http://www.prospace.org/
http://www.space-frontier.org/
And, of course, write to your legislators regarding budgets, and write to support, or seek out jobs at, NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/
http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/
And the ESA:
http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/index.html
Let's hope that global cooperation can be achieved to produce an even more exciting era of space exploration than the one conceived as a cold war one-upmanship game... that would be great!
The point of this kind of work would be to allow
direct brain control of a telerobotic operator that could certainly help in terms of giving them back some autonomy in grocery shopping, buying their medicines, etc.
The distance work allows for the possibility of decoupling the human from the device that is performing the actions they no longer can. So, a paralyzed person could send out their remote-brain-controlled Waldo to do their shopping, clean their house, whatever. It will help them regain some sense of self-sufficiency - at least they control the robot themselves.
Also, in this experiement they are controlling a robot arm, not an amputated human arm... doing THAT at a great distance certainly is pretty suspect...
Of Course Iridium Will Be Saved...
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Iridium Saved?
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· Score: 4
Nobody likes the idea of a bunch of unused satellites... Government and industry groups will keep trying to find ways to prop-up an Iridium company because they want all those satellites...
The government never has enough satellites, really, maybe this is the first reverse pork: government somehow conned industry into pissing away a whole lot of money on something for them for a change;->
But seriously, I think the original Iridium tried to move too quickly into too broad of a market. They frittered away a lot of money on ads and PR to people who had no use for the stuff, and didn't concentrate on a smaller, specialist market that could actually use the system.
The military likes to subcontract to commercial providers, and will probably be happy to have unsecure comms moved off their proprietary network. Humanitarian? Most groups have no money, but the UN does... So do shipping companies, and constant contact with your vessels (whatever they may be) can cut costs drastically by allowing for more precise dynamic rerouting of whatever your cargo is through your system. The adventure industry is also quite wealthy - hey, I bet Survivor III producers will sign up immediately;-)
You and I may not need this service, but some people do, and maybe Motorola, in addition to lack of focus, just put the wrong people on selling it...
I concur... The industry has grown and now the growth is just slowing... It couldn't have continued on forever, and now we are moving into a more mature phase of the industry where you need more than a.com at the end of your name to get VC money and customers...
Personally, things are fine for me, and seem that they will be for a while. My skills are in demand (both technical and business), the job market is quite robust in all the places we hire people, and the value of my company has increased by over 50% in the last 12 months.
But things are also better for my company (www.webmind.com) Why? We make innovative software which, while "Web enabled," really can work in any computing environment and is applicable to non-Internet as well as Internet information retrieval and understanding applications. By no longer having to "compete" with dogfoodonline.com or fedexyouapizza.com or whatever for VC attention, PR attention, and valuation - we're better off. We're actually creating something with intrinsic value, not just a "new e-tailing paradigm" or some such nonsense.
Software and hardware companies which are focused on solving business problems, and maintaining development (and research/innovation), will do just fine. People who hoped to get rich off of community sites or e-tailing have merely found out what brick-and-mortar players in these areas knew: advertising models (like TV and community sites) and retail models are difficult to make work, the margins are thin, competition is fierce, and customers will bolt to your competition at your first mistake.
There is an old adage in business people seemed to have forgotten: "you don't get rich in retailing" You don't, but Sam Walton does. Amazon.Com, despite doomsayers, will probably survive - but many other "web superstores" will probably fail. Focused retailers like Fatbrain.Com who provide excellent price and service will probably also survive. Otherwise, retailing will thus, most likely, remain in the hands of retail experts like Wal-Mart.
Things which actually belong on the Web: software sales, information services (some ad-driven sites will survive, community access low-budget sites will survive, and some subscription sites will survive - hey, just like TV and print media), etc. will continue as well. Shake-ups will occur. The wheat will be separated from the chaff, as they say.
We'll hopefully be left with a set of companies which have strong economic - and Internet community building - value, and be rid of all the completly embarassing and silly companies that were already making our industry look bad when they WERE doing well... Everyone knew THAT bubble had to burst, but it doesn't have to - and it won't - take the whole tech market down with it.
A very good point. It is exactly like the contact address of a registered business - something which is required when you register a business, and is public (though a bit harder to find, not much).
URLs and e-mail addresses can certainly be "unlisted" and provide you with whatever levels of privacy are actually possible. As the registrant of a domain, though, it makes sense for you to have contact info available in the case where other system operators need to contact you because of abuse coming from your site, in order to track down problems in the (shared) Internet network infrastructure (though these days, this is less common), etc.
If you're worried about someone knowing that you own www.hotsexbabes.com or whatever, you can always register under an assumed name and use a P.O. Box address (you can even get "anonymous remailer" P.O. Boxes). As long as you have a legitimate e-mail address where you can be contacted, so the registrar can send you your forms, and a valid method of payment, the registrars don't really care very much what name and address you use.
This may be more trouble for you, but if privacy is a concern, you can get a reasonable amount of it without denying others in the community the ability to contact you about your site if it seems to be the source of some issues. (An argument could be made that you can always send such issues to root@domainname.com - but I think the ability to send a "cease and desist" letter to persistent spam sites and other nuisances is of some value - though, of course, the registrars don't actually check valid physical addresses...)
While I can see the valid points of both the privacy argument and the community argument, I think one can get reasonable enough privacy protection if desired that having WHOIS public is not such a big negative deal and the community seems to like having it...
Of course it could - in theory. This is the idea behind the area of biocybernetics which would utilize computers to replace damaged motor neuron clusters (or, some people hope for augmentation...) There has not been much success, yet, in having a computer and a brain working together to share control of a living organism (the pacemaker may be the closest, but it's not ideal).
Already, in bionics, machines have been used to replace damaged limbs, joints, and organs (with varying degress of success). But all of these systems I know of involve control of the machine parts by both the brain and a machine, not control of the organic parts by both.
The Duke stuff is particularly interesting because it claims to have success in mapping primate brain signals directly into control signals. This is a big deal. Previous commercial "brainwave" systems such as IBVA, which some may bring up as "been there done that" were not so accurate, they basically were partially successful attempts to match magnetic and electrical patterns in the brain (received through the skull, using sensors attached to the head) into signals. The coolest use for this was making music or trippy graphics based on "thought patterns," for most other things it was not so good. Other systems, such as the Biomuse (which actually is very useful for people with some forms of paralysis, allowing them to control computers with their eyes, or arms - and also used for music, by Atau Tanaka), also used electromagnetic sensors, but on muscle groups.
Lots of interesting work is being done in organism-machine interconnection. Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern University has a robot controlled by the brain of a lamprey eel (I think that may have been on/. before) William H. Dobelle's group in NY (www.artificialvision.com) has a blind patient which is receiving artificial vision through computer processing of the optical input from cameras being relayed into his brain (giving him currently at least edge detection - enough to navigate through normal rooms, etc.)
Now, the twist on the Duke/MIT research is that the Internet was used as the communications medium between the brain and the robot. While this is not most useful for giving quadropalegics back some motion of themselves (they would be best served through a robotic exoskeleton for this purpose), they could telerobotically control a mobile robot to perform functions in the world for them. For someone who has great difficulties moving (and also for top-secret military experiments, I'm sure...) direct brain control of a telerobotic operator could certainly help in terms of giving them back some autonomy in grocery shopping, buying their medicines, etc. However, I think, psychologically people may have an easier time dealing with someone whose robot stays close to them - or that they wear, or that is attached to their wheelchair - at least in the short-term.
For some interesting philosophical discussions of Cyborgs and human-computer direct interfacing, see, among others, Hans Moravec, Donna Haraway, and the late Alexander Chislenko (http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html) - all of whom I don't necessarily agree with 100%, but have some interesting things to say...
Here are Dr. Nicolelis' web sites, if you want to read more than just NYT about his work:
http://nicolelis.neuro.duke.edu/
http://www.neuro.duke.edu/faculty/Nicoleli/Nicol eli.htm
...And Dr. Srinivasan at MIT:
http://webrle.mit.edu/rlestaff/p-srin.htm
One would hope that NASA could design a system that wasn't quite that easily tampered with... They pretty much know where the sun is, for one thing, and... using the satellite's own telemetry readings as precedential over anything over the 'net... not look at the sun...
Also, presumably, the 5|z would need to figure out more complicated commands than just "look here" but rather how to simulate the patterns the system was looking for... let me rephrase what I said above: "hey satellite, here is some data" "hmmm, that looks like it might be interesting, let me look more closely over there..."
Finally, of course, you would put some constraints on what the thing was supposed to be doing, and some threshholds past which it would say "oh, someone is messing with me, I better inform a ground station and lock-out Internet access for a period..."
Yeah, no system is perfectly secure, but come on, give the folks at NASA a little credit here... SRL, which is a bunch of volunteers making robot performance art, could build a system where you could control a dangerous robot and not kill anyone, I suspect NASA can protect their satellites from having anything too stupid done with them...
Telerobotics over the Internet, especially Space telerobotics, is one of the cooler things being done online (it sure beats yet another porn server). Now, though this system doesn't yet allow telerobotic control of satellites, they do leave open the possibility for future flights. Survival Research Labs (www.srl.org) has already on several occasions opened up control of their various dangerous robots to Internet users, at some performances and installations, and it was a lot of fun for all involved. Controlling satellites would be at least as fun - not necessarily giving us control of their thrusters, but cameras and sample-collection arms would be cool.
E-commerce payments for custom satellite photos, though, opens up a whole new realm of spy technology for the business and consumer markets. Just think, punch in your credit card # and take a picture of that neighbor's yard that's all closed-in by a tall fence... Or your competitor's shipping depot... or whatever... Of course, geeks like us will instead (or also) want to buy custom picture of our favorite astronomical body - but I wonder which type of photos they were referring to in the announcement... hmmm...
Finally, I wonder... why aren't they testing a SETI@Home-like system where the satellite collects whatever data it collects, and users download processing software from a NASA ground station, receive data over the on-satellite server, process it and then... either send it to the ground station, or, in some applications, results could be sent back to the satellite and fed into software running on board that determines the satellite's next actions if the user's machine has uploaded some results which impact the task being carried out... THAT would be cool... SETI@Home-type work with real-time feedback loops with the satellites collecting the data... "Hey satellite, we think we found something, look more closely here..."
First off, MSIE does actually have another link back to M$... MSN is the default home page... big deal...
Now, this will come as heresy to/.ers, but MSIE is better than Netscape, and Netscape's money-grubbing is doing nothing about this. While the Mozilla crew has done a great job with Mozilla, on Windows, at least, it lags behind MSIE. IE renders faster, and, horrors, is more stable. (This seems to be true on Linux, too... My Linux Netscape dumps core about every 5 minutes, whereas IE only does it about every 15 minutes...)
Plug-ins in IE are - just by empirical observation here folks - more stable, too. Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat, etc. all cause various problems on my Netscape installs, more so than under IE. Microsoft's JVM is better, as is their implementation of ECMA/JavaScript (embarrasingly for both Sun and Netscape, really). After being lambasted for being nothing but a marketing organization, Microsoft has put a lot of time and money into making the last couple versions of IE really good...
Netscape seems to have decided to take just the opposite approach and become nothing more than a marketing arm of AOL... all the good work is being done for by the Mozilla folks, and as volunteers they're having a hard time keeping up with the big bucks of M$. AOL seems to not give a damn about putting any money into the project to give the engineering effort a fighting chance against the stuff M$ is doing.
IE, at least on Windows, and in the versions I've tested on Linux, is just faster, more stable, more flexible in terms of add-ons it will accept without problems... better.
I'd like to see Mozilla kick their ass, but to do that, I think N$/AOhelL needs to do more than just sponge off their efforts and build links to annoying adverts...
There already was a Free Hardware Foundation, co-founded by my friend Jonathan Levine (it's even at http://www.fhf.org)... I guess because they're Candadians - or maybe it's because they're related to NetBSD instead of Linux or the Cambridge GNU crew in Cambridge - they don't count...
The Linux Community is too hyped on porting to new hardware, and too lax on simplification, and applications.
People use computers to do things, not just as fetish accessories. At least, most people do.
What applications will people run on a Linux handheld? Is someone working on a Linux Host and Handheld system similar to M$ Outlook and similar tools that would allow the primary users of handhelds (people trying to organize their lives) to actually organize contacts, communications, and calendar entries in a unified manner? The Qt/Embedded looked like it had at least the remote half of that pairing...
The Qt/Embedded interface photo looks nice - it even looks simple enough (something a lot of people don't feel about Linux on the desktop), though I don't yet know how complex it is to install (many still have difficulty installing Linux on their desktops - maybe they are idiots, or maybe just busy with the rest of their job... but a lot of these folks buy computers and if Linux wants to rule, the need to be taken into account...)
I love Linux, I love *nix in general, but the dearth of applications and difficulty of installation and maintenance makes it such that I can not use it in my organization, adn thus use it for work without at least as much hassle as using Windows. There is too much emphasis on "gee whiz" and not enough on real work (with the exception of real engineering work, but unfortunately business people, not engineers, control the market - even the computer market)...
I hope that these systems work as well as they look in the pictures, and maybe this will start Linux down the road of acceptance on the Business desktop if developers focus on the host-side applications as well...
Though there is still a place in the world, in my mind, for mid-to-large SIMD systems (SGI/Crays, Starfires, RS/6000s, etc.), this conference and other events are showing that cluster supercomputing and widely distributed computing (a'la SETI@Home, Distributed.Net, WebWorld, etc.) are also being taken seriously.
What drives any advances in hardware is applications that can take advantage of them. Supercomputing is not dead because on top of the usual uses (fluid dynamics modeling, codebreaking, etc.), the Internet and new algorithms in IR and AI are combining to compel people to want to approach Information Retrieval and understanding problems which are at the level of requiring supercomputing resources.
The company I work for (www.webmind.com) is building a hybrid AI system for IR and understanding (among other things) which is optimized to run not on a vector supercomputer but on a cluster of independent servers (though a nice MIMD supercomputer would be nice). With commodity hardware we have managed to get over 100GB of RAM and 200GHz of CPU for less than $500,000 for our first prototype of a large installation. A 6-64way IBM RS/6000 starts at $420,000.
Missing from the write-up (and possibly from the conference) are the folks at Starbridge Systems who are working on a "Hypercomputer" which has a field-reprogrammable topology. If any supercomputer company that needs it deserves venture capital funding, it's this one. The idea of allowing an application to change the network topology of the processors to optimize for its own data representation is extremely powerful - it's the next "big thing" in both MIMD supercomputing and networks for cluster supercomputing, IMNSHO.
SETI@Home is a very cool project, but it would be nice to have more about applications driving supercomputing at such conferences. Distributed.Net seems to get too little time since their client isn't as pretty as SETI, and also cluster supercomputing not over the Internet is being used for all sorts of cool stuff, and it would be especially interesting to hear more results about commodity clusters vs. proprietary large systems in areas like fluid dynamics modeling where the proprietary systems usually rule.
Also, more of a focus on evolutionary computing, FPGAs in supercomputer design, and information retrieval and understanding applications would be nice.
But overall, a good writeup of what looks like it was a pretty interesting and refreshingly diverse (not just "big iron" focused) SC conference...
Poor health information can have very severe consequences. My girlfriend's father is one of the top Radiation Ontologists in the world, and he also leads an R&D lab which is doing work in both radiation and genetic ontology. Much of th rest of her family are also top doctors in the areas of bioengineering, psychiatry, nutrition, etc. It is on their authority I can say that a number of health sites on the Net contain information which is genuinely dangerous to your health. The lack of regulation of these sites is exposing people to danger, and it is not only the right but the duty of governments to protect their people. Doing so in conjunction with health professionals - that is, calling in the experts to help create treaty and legislation - is the proper way to "get it right" (don't we wish Internet experts were called in for Internet law issues?)
Not only will this help the consumer, it will also help promote healthy competition in the business. In response to the poor-to-dangerous cancer information online, my girlfriend's father and I put together a preliminary site regarding cancer treatment. However, lacking any clear regulatory guidelines for online health sites, we had two predicaments:
1) What could we legally do? He wanted to build a FAQ, and respond to specific questions. In the United States, you need to be certified to practice medicine in each state... What level of advice would be in violation of which state laws? Could we only allow people from New York to visit the site? What about international visitors?
2) Restricting ourselves to the types of services existing sites seemed to be getting away with, how could a small site with two people and hardly any money compete with financially well-off sites, most of which were in the top 10 popularity but had poor quality cancer information? There was no way, on the Internet, for anyone to believe that our site was any better - and it certainly LOOKED more fly-by-night, despite the credentials of the doctor behind it.
Just being a WHO certified.health would be a big boon to small sites run by qualified health professionals who would like to provide high-quality online information and services to people. It would at least mean that the information on the site was of sufficient quality to meet a set of criteria for suitability for patient use. Some of the larger health sites would really deserve to fail this certification at this point - and the result would hopefully be that they would improve their information and services in order to get a.health... and thus the consumer's life is improved.
I think we Internet geeks who support lobbying ICANN and other governmental, quasi-governmental, and pseudo-governmental organizations and monopolioes on behalf of making the Internet better for the people actually ON the Internet lobby ICANN to accept this proposal.
Re:Some clarification on "gene patents"
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Squatting On Life
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· Score: 1
Isolation of naturally occurring DNA patterns should not be patentable under the patent law provisions which prohibit the raw products of nature. Elements in the periodic table, even transuranic elements which must be isolated in a laboratory, and for some of which there is no evidence as to whether or not they even form in nature, are not patentable. Why? They are raw products of nature. The same should hold for DNA sequences isolated from naturally occurring organisms.
Modification of DNA sequences (of which
"purification" would be a form) would allow for patentability under existing patent law - or, at least, COULD allow for it if the resulting genes meets the legal challenges of utlity, novelty, and nonobviousness.
As with computer software algorithm patents, there are a few legal approaches to take in fighting them. One is that they are processes and not products, and thus not eligible for patentability - but the courts don't seem to be willing to buy this argument, though there are certainly some legal scholars who do. Another is that they are naturally occurring (that mathematical algorithms and DNA sequences both are naturally occurring), but this argument only applies to sequences found in nature, and in the case of algorithms - it is even trickier to decide what is "naturally occurring" and what isn't. Yet another is to protect a smaller, but fundamental, set of the domain from patents by selectively attacking specific patents and saying they are too fundamental to the domain to meet patent qualifications of nonobviousness and novelty. The patent system as it stands seems to be most amenable to this approach, though obviously it does the least to address wider issues of whether or not these things legitimately succumb to patentability.
However, letter of the law aside for a moment, biological patents are an interesting and contentious legal and bioethical issue. The questions of the ethical and moral implications of patenting the algorithms for generating living things are obviously leading to heated debates. This argument will also erupt with respects to software patents if true Artificial Intelligence is ever devised... in fact, some are already trying to lump in current Evolutionary Computing / Artificial Life code in such ethical arguments. Law and Ethics are not isomorphic, but legislators and judges certainly are succeptable to ethical and moral arguments, and thus this part of the discussion is also important to trying to map (or influence) future legal direction in these two oddly related areas.
Though it is a journal article that requires payment, this article may be interesting to people interested in biopatents:
http://www.biolawbusiness.com/abstract3-4.html#p atenability
All good points, especially about Euclidian thinking, though in spacetime the boundary of the universe is in time AND space...
As for why gravitational waves and not others... the different wavelength may mean the ability to pass through some interuniversal medium...
As for the gravitational shear making the universe uneven, this presumes no "super-bang" which evenly spread out a whole mess of universes pretty much uniformly through the metaverse...
But, really, this is all just amusing speculation... Don't mistake it with empirical or even real theoretical physics... I've not bothered to make calculations about this stuff, just make up stories...;-)
You're just guessing... I am stating this from the past experience of at least one company operating in the SF Bay area. Even in teh US, some "obsolete" chips are more popular with hobbyists than the new ones - this company sold those over the counter to locals. The overseas operations disassembled boards, reclaimed useful parts (they defined useful according to their local markets), and extracted metal from the rest. The scrap plastic, I don't know what happened to it. Either landfill, or as road filler, would be my guess.
Some third world countries, like Brazil, where I am at this very moment in my company's Brazilian engineering office, where we have many excellent engineers, actually DO have legions of trained repair techs, and programmers, etc. India is another third world country that shares this trait, as is Russia. Of course, they also have lots of poor people, but a depressed economy is not isomorphic with everyone being technologically backwards and uneducated...
Unless you've actually left the US, and actually been involved with the computer recycling business, you are just making things up...
Regarding the other guy's note about UPS and FedEx trucks... I will assume he is right, though I know that the UPS truck that delivers in the industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn that I live in often returns empty, I will assume this route is an exception in the UPS system. Other shipping companies DO seem, however, to have lots of extra space - as some companies make a living pooling it and reselling it.
Of course, when others tried to do this, the big companies complained that this would throw the Internet into chaos - presuamably meaning they could not control the assignment of TLDs and thus get first dibs on prime names by knowing first what will be available.
However, if Internet users at large created a new TLD authority and open-source, open-license software that was reliable augmentation to DNS & BIND, then some serious alternative to centralized registry authority could be put forth.
The system could simply allow arbitrary TLDs, presumably bounded by a character limit, and domain names on a first-come, first-serve basis. The system would be distributed in a GNUtella-like fashion, and name conflict resolution would be performed by timestamp comparison.
Of course, this is just one idea, and a preliminary description of it... but there are only three other alternatives: whine uselessly, a class action lawsuit (if some lawyer thinks they can win the case, and in what country?) or form a lobby on behalf of general Internet users to try to change what ICANN is doing...
This argument is not based on fact. A good friend of mine was involved in the management of a sizable recycling company in the Bay Area for many years, and they not only helped keep many tons of electronic and metal scrap out of landfill, but they did it at a profit. Yes, that's right, a profit on recycling.
In fact, IBM will likely make a profit on this deal. You PAY them $29.99 for recycling AND they get to sell or reuse the parts? Hey, I'll give you THAT deal! First of all, most solid state parts don't go bad very easily, so there is plenty for them to recover. Secondly, reselling used computers in third world countries can be fairly lucrative.
The company my friend helped run did both of these things, plus metal recovery (which was actually their first business - recovery of gold from electronics assemblies to make jewelry). As with junked cars, the parts value can exceed the value of the assembled system once a certain age is past. However, if the system still works, it may be cheaper to just sell it used rather than expend the energy and time to disassemble it. Thus, this company, and presumably IBM, would dismantle the broken systems for parts or to recover precious metals, and sell the working ones overseas.
My friend's company did this in, if I recall correctly, Indonesia and the Phillipines. Regarding environmental issues. For second-hand resale, the energy and pollution in transport did NOT outweigh the manufacture and transport of new systems (the transport expenditure is basically the same, but you're manufacturing new stuff as well, so how could new be cheaper costwise or environmentally?) For scrapping, the way that the components parts business is set-up, there is already a lot of transport going on, so this was also actually cheaper on both counts. As for metal recovery: not digging new mines, or, worse for an over-mined commodity like gold, lots of test mines and horrible things like sifter mines, gave quite a financial and environmental benefit.
Recycling of many items, especially complex machines, is not only environmentally sound, but can be quite lucrative. IBM is really quite brilliant for doing this, especially since, being IBM, they can do it with minimal additional transport costs?
Why? Most recycling moves through recycling centers. If IBM puts these at their distribution centers, to move the recycled equipment, you're mostly moving it in trucks which otherwise would be returning empty from distribution centers. In terms of home users shipping back via UPS, the financial cost is a little greater, but not really the environmental: again, you're primarily using empty space. Most UPS (and FedEx, and whatever) trucks return mostly empty to their depots. Someone else I knew well wrote the truck routing software for a major "less than truckload" shipper: their business is to resell the empty space on trucks. By making use of "waste" services to move waste goods, you're so far doing quite well financially and environmentally.
The disassembly process is also almost never more expensive or environmentally damaging than manufacturing, and certainly resale of used systems is pretty obviously without any added environmental cost.
If you know anything about the businesses of recycling and shipping, you realize that IBM has made a really smart move: if they know how to manage all this stuff properly (or if they partnered with folks who do), they'll make a profit AND get the PR bonus of being an "environmentally friendly" company.
In the VR industry, stuff like this has been done for years ranging from cameras detecting light reflective points placed on the body,
magnetic field systems, muscle current detection, eye movement tracking, suits and gloves and helmets with multi-position switches, spring or memory metal tension measurements, infrared distance measurements, etc. There is a plethora of systems of various price and quality, and the leaders in this industry are Polhemus and Fakespace, with a few new folks who are consolidating the remains of failed companies and producing new stuff.
The VR industry was too early, like the AI industry, and failed to deliver on all its promise - and thus failed commercially. Also like AI, a resurgence seems to be building. However, I hope this time we can separate hype from reality (and dumb ideas from useful ones).
As you may have noticed when you move around real 3D space, you don't just use one part of your body. So, controlling movement through a 3D simulation with just your head seems a bit ridiculous. Why is it more ridiculous than using your hands to control a joystick? When you use a joystick, you are using your hands for their purpose: to manipulate small physical objects. This is then converted into movement in the simulation algorithmically, and (primarily since we're used to driving motorized vehicles) we're pretty good at mentally interpreting our hand movements into planar movement (and even some 3D movement) in 3D space.
Now, if you look at the VR and telerobotics community, what use is head tracking? It is usually used in conjunction with hand (or whole body) control of motion, in order to control field of view. That is: your body or hands control movement, and you use your head to look around. Sounds familiar. That's the point.
So, if you combine decent head tracking (and the technology they use does not seem decent) with joysticks or gloves or suits, you're on your way to something (Fakespace has a nice system called the Boom which is fairly good for both moving and looking around). The problem is, can you get the response time necessary for your mind to associate the movement of your head with what your eyes are getting back from the screen.
First off, the bezel on the CRT may interfere sufficiently with your field of vision that your mind loses track of the association between head tracking and "looking around" in the simulation (or game). Serious VR and telerobotic apps with lots of funding use periscopes (like on the Boom), goggles, or helmets to ensure that association by immersion into the environment.
Experienced gamers may have overcome the motion sickness from non-immersive motion sufficiently to not have this problem, but the differing nature of the head-tracking vs. joystick (or keyboard) game movement may be such that you still have a period where you have to adjust by playing A LOT and getting used to the sensation - that is, training your mind to perceive this weird world you now inhabit.
So, it may be fun to use such a hybrid system, if the technology is there. However, camera-based tracking technology has the worst tracking resolution and response time so far. Worse, this system is going to be highly succeptable to image noise - a problem Biovision and others got around by using reflectors you place on your body and associate with points of movement that the software maps each point on the body to. What their system seems to be doing is trying to handle this with motion vector extraction of the whole image received, and/or diffing the image and using quadrants or octants to translate changes into on-screen motions (unfortunately, I could not try this out to verify).
Such a methodology is (a) slow (especially since the tracking computations are being done on the machine that is already bogged-down rendering the game - VR apps are often multi-CPU) and (b) not terribly accurate... So, this system, in my analysis, is just hype. It is no new direction in gaming, rather an old one poorly rehashed.
I suggest that you stick with joysticks and keyboards until the good stuff becomes more affordable...
A good visualization allows a good set of data to more readily be converted into the knowledge the user is seeking by analyzing the data. It adds information to the data through the visual arrangement, allowing humans - who are better at visual pattern recognition than numerical or textual pattern recognition - to quickly mine out the information they need.
Wile the Antarcti.ca idea is cool, and the design is visually attractive (at least, to me), I find that the presentation of the information could use some additional work. The sites that are listed are plotted as points on a map of "Antarctica" representing the Net - but the distance between points and their relative positioning does not seem to carry any particular meaning (at least, the sites I linked to from this site did not seem to have easily discernable traits which would make the distances meaningful)
The site is certainly attractive, but I think the integration of a system of text similarity measurement and positioning of the sites based on these metrics would greatly enhance the utility of the site (or, if this is already being done, it is not being done very well and needs improvement)
Also, the site will not be able to grow very large without a better notion of clustering based on some actually meaningful site comparison metrics (text similarity, google-like popularity measurements, etc.), since in order to have millions of sites on the map the idea they have implemented of moving around the map will need to be combined with some notion of places on the map having greater semantic meaning and also to reduce clutter, a more dynamic system of display which allows for better "zoom in / out" type functionality to "drill-down" into areas of interest based on representative, canonical sites that would appear on the high-level map.
All the beginnings are there, and it is a good start, I hope this goes somewhere...
By the way...
Anyone who thinks this field is cool, check out (if you haven't already) the books by Edward Tufte (I've put a reference at the bottom). And if you think you'd like to make some competing visualizations, check out this really great start-up data relationship viz tool company which my company is considering partnering with: www.thinkmap.com
----------------
Tufte's Books:
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/Search/SearchResult s.asp?from=bookinfo&Au=Tufte%2C+Edward+R%2 E&Ti=&Su=&Pu=&RegAction=t&SearchFunction=reg&qorde r=title
The universe is the largest gravitationally bound structure in the universe, since sets can include themselves... But, really, I digress;-)
Or, do I. The possibility exists that what we observe as our detectable universe is a gravitationally bound structure which is immersed in a large collection of similar structres. Currently, this would be pure speculation, but it is feasible that as these distant structures are studied in more detail gravitational effects which indicate some other very large masses outside the bounds of what we can detect as the edge of our universe are discovered. This could, of course, just mean that more large galaxy clusters lurk outside our range of detection, or it could be that an effect sufficiently severe be discovered that it appears that maybe another extremely large gravitationally bound cluster - one we might wish to call another "universe" - existed.
Right now, of course, this is all just speculation... but it's fun speculation:-)
As a manager, I'll give my management perspective:->
In our organization communcation is actually enhanced through the use of flex-time. We have offices in NY, California, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia, and clients in the US and Europe. With all these timezones, it is to our great benefit to allow people to come in to their office at odd hours when they are working with people in another office - and since the people who work with each other can change depending on the project being done and thus what groups need to interact, it isn't the case that we can just have different shifts to handle this.
We also have part-time telecommuting privledges, which not only gives people some time to work quietly and alone on difficult technical problems, but also people who live far away can spend some commute time each week on work, and also in the office we can share desks between people who come in 2-3 days a week on different days (important to us because we're in NY city where space is hard to find and rents are high once you find it).
However, the argument onion2k makes about "doing what you like when you like to do it" is also pretty compelling - at least in our organization where about 80% or more of the staff really like their jobs a lot. People are genuinely more productive at their personal peak hours of the day, and we have people who do their best work when they come in at 6am, and others who would rather show up at 11am and work until past midnight. We just require that people who work on the same project overlap in work times at least 4 hours each day. Those employees who are not as in love with their jobs, or who have displayed less of an ability to work well alone, or who have to meet with clients - they do get some time restrictions placed on them, but even then, with some flexibility (say, come in between 8:30am and 10:30am, except if meetings dictate otherwise, and stay at least 8 hours, and no telecommuting unless working over 40 hours in the week... as an example)
Managing people on flexible schedules, even ones that minimally overlap with your own, is not so bad if they actually respond to e-mails and produce measurable results in their work. As a software engineering organization our company has a pretty easy time telling whether or not projects are being completed and people are being productive, especially since our managers are technical and can distinguish an employee who is not really working from one who has run up against an unforseen technical difficulty.
So, if your managers are up to it both emotionally and in terms of knowledge of their work to allow for judging performance fairly, then flex-time (and part-time telecommuting) can be really great...
Slashdot Mirror
"Does this just prove once again that one company cannot own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network?"
;-)
What it illustrates is that, given intellectual property issues, is that it is very difficult for one company to own a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. A company which had the inclination and resources to exert reasonable editorial controls over the content - say an AOL or a distributed version of Geocities or some similar notion - could certainly operate a PTP network in a similar manner to how non PTP communities with regulation of content and checks against IP infringement are operated.
In terms of open PTP networks, what one company, or a consortium, can do is to promote open standards and design recommendations in order to facilitate a global network of file-sharing (and in the case of my company's WebWorld project, also processor-sharing a'la SETI@Home). A modular design to allow to plug-in other protocols is also probably a good idea, since we don't yet know what standards may emerge and survive
The centralized notion leaves a single company vulnerable to control abuses, whereas by providing a technology and not a service one gives the responsibility over to the members of the network. However, it is unclear why services like Napster have not yet succeeded in the argument that like an unedited BBS they are just a repository, not a publishing/editorial board with a responsibility to prevent abuse. (If someone knows the details of this legal area, please post.)
Very good points! Controlled de-orbiting of MIR poses no signifigant threat to life on earth (less than normal meteor activity, since meteors are generally not so kind as to aim for the deep ocean), the mold is not "space mold" and will not pollute the earth or grow into space monsters, and it is indeed sad to close this chapter of space history... but I hope the ISS is opening an exciting new chapter.
I would also like to add that the Russians having contributed so greatly to space exploration should continue to be invited to participate in internation space exploration efforts.
While some people like to make fun of MIR, for many years I didn't see any other countries with orbital space stations - falling apart or otherwise. It is sad that MIR will have to be destroyed, and can not be boosted into a safe parking orbit, but let's hope the International Space Station will be an even bigger success and that renewed interest in manned space exploration will manage to resurface without the cold war posturing to drive it.
If you want to support manned space exploration, you can check out:
http://planetary.org
http://thinkmars.net/
http://www.nss.org/
http://www.prospace.org/
http://www.space-frontier.org/
And, of course, write to your legislators regarding budgets, and write to support, or seek out jobs at, NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/
http://nmp.jpl.nasa.gov/
And the ESA:
http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/index.html
Let's hope that global cooperation can be achieved to produce an even more exciting era of space exploration than the one conceived as a cold war one-upmanship game... that would be great!
Cray still makes Vector supercomputers.
SGI just sold the Cray unit, to Tera
(http://www.tera.com/) who appears to have, wisely, taken on the Cray brand in toto.
The point of this kind of work would be to allow
direct brain control of a telerobotic operator that could certainly help in terms of giving them back some autonomy in grocery shopping, buying their medicines, etc.
The distance work allows for the possibility of decoupling the human from the device that is performing the actions they no longer can. So, a paralyzed person could send out their remote-brain-controlled Waldo to do their shopping, clean their house, whatever. It will help them regain some sense of self-sufficiency - at least they control the robot themselves.
Also, in this experiement they are controlling a robot arm, not an amputated human arm... doing THAT at a great distance certainly is pretty suspect...
Nobody likes the idea of a bunch of unused satellites... Government and industry groups will keep trying to find ways to prop-up an Iridium company because they want all those satellites...
;->
;-)
The government never has enough satellites, really, maybe this is the first reverse pork: government somehow conned industry into pissing away a whole lot of money on something for them for a change
But seriously, I think the original Iridium tried to move too quickly into too broad of a market. They frittered away a lot of money on ads and PR to people who had no use for the stuff, and didn't concentrate on a smaller, specialist market that could actually use the system.
The military likes to subcontract to commercial providers, and will probably be happy to have unsecure comms moved off their proprietary network. Humanitarian? Most groups have no money, but the UN does... So do shipping companies, and constant contact with your vessels (whatever they may be) can cut costs drastically by allowing for more precise dynamic rerouting of whatever your cargo is through your system. The adventure industry is also quite wealthy - hey, I bet Survivor III producers will sign up immediately
You and I may not need this service, but some people do, and maybe Motorola, in addition to lack of focus, just put the wrong people on selling it...
I concur... The industry has grown and now the growth is just slowing... It couldn't have continued on forever, and now we are moving into a more mature phase of the industry where you need more than a .com at the end of your name to get VC money and customers...
Personally, things are fine for me, and seem that they will be for a while. My skills are in demand (both technical and business), the job market is quite robust in all the places we hire people, and the value of my company has increased by over 50% in the last 12 months.
But things are also better for my company (www.webmind.com) Why? We make innovative software which, while "Web enabled," really can work in any computing environment and is applicable to non-Internet as well as Internet information retrieval and understanding applications. By no longer having to "compete" with dogfoodonline.com or fedexyouapizza.com or whatever for VC attention, PR attention, and valuation - we're better off. We're actually creating something with intrinsic value, not just a "new e-tailing paradigm" or some such nonsense.
Software and hardware companies which are focused on solving business problems, and maintaining development (and research/innovation), will do just fine. People who hoped to get rich off of community sites or e-tailing have merely found out what brick-and-mortar players in these areas knew: advertising models (like TV and community sites) and retail models are difficult to make work, the margins are thin, competition is fierce, and customers will bolt to your competition at your first mistake.
There is an old adage in business people seemed to have forgotten: "you don't get rich in retailing" You don't, but Sam Walton does. Amazon.Com, despite doomsayers, will probably survive - but many other "web superstores" will probably fail. Focused retailers like Fatbrain.Com who provide excellent price and service will probably also survive. Otherwise, retailing will thus, most likely, remain in the hands of retail experts like Wal-Mart.
Things which actually belong on the Web: software sales, information services (some ad-driven sites will survive, community access low-budget sites will survive, and some subscription sites will survive - hey, just like TV and print media), etc. will continue as well. Shake-ups will occur. The wheat will be separated from the chaff, as they say.
We'll hopefully be left with a set of companies which have strong economic - and Internet community building - value, and be rid of all the completly embarassing and silly companies that were already making our industry look bad when they WERE doing well... Everyone knew THAT bubble had to burst, but it doesn't have to - and it won't - take the whole tech market down with it.
A very good point. It is exactly like the contact address of a registered business - something which is required when you register a business, and is public (though a bit harder to find, not much).
URLs and e-mail addresses can certainly be "unlisted" and provide you with whatever levels of privacy are actually possible. As the registrant of a domain, though, it makes sense for you to have contact info available in the case where other system operators need to contact you because of abuse coming from your site, in order to track down problems in the (shared) Internet network infrastructure (though these days, this is less common), etc.
If you're worried about someone knowing that you own www.hotsexbabes.com or whatever, you can always register under an assumed name and use a P.O. Box address (you can even get "anonymous remailer" P.O. Boxes). As long as you have a legitimate e-mail address where you can be contacted, so the registrar can send you your forms, and a valid method of payment, the registrars don't really care very much what name and address you use.
This may be more trouble for you, but if privacy is a concern, you can get a reasonable amount of it without denying others in the community the ability to contact you about your site if it seems to be the source of some issues. (An argument could be made that you can always send such issues to root@domainname.com - but I think the ability to send a "cease and desist" letter to persistent spam sites and other nuisances is of some value - though, of course, the registrars don't actually check valid physical addresses...)
While I can see the valid points of both the privacy argument and the community argument, I think one can get reasonable enough privacy protection if desired that having WHOIS public is not such a big negative deal and the community seems to like having it...
Of course it could - in theory. This is the idea behind the area of biocybernetics which would utilize computers to replace damaged motor neuron clusters (or, some people hope for augmentation...) There has not been much success, yet, in having a computer and a brain working together to share control of a living organism (the pacemaker may be the closest, but it's not ideal).
/. before) William H. Dobelle's group in NY (www.artificialvision.com) has a blind patient which is receiving artificial vision through computer processing of the optical input from cameras being relayed into his brain (giving him currently at least edge detection - enough to navigate through normal rooms, etc.)
l eli.htm
Already, in bionics, machines have been used to replace damaged limbs, joints, and organs (with varying degress of success). But all of these systems I know of involve control of the machine parts by both the brain and a machine, not control of the organic parts by both.
The Duke stuff is particularly interesting because it claims to have success in mapping primate brain signals directly into control signals. This is a big deal. Previous commercial "brainwave" systems such as IBVA, which some may bring up as "been there done that" were not so accurate, they basically were partially successful attempts to match magnetic and electrical patterns in the brain (received through the skull, using sensors attached to the head) into signals. The coolest use for this was making music or trippy graphics based on "thought patterns," for most other things it was not so good. Other systems, such as the Biomuse (which actually is very useful for people with some forms of paralysis, allowing them to control computers with their eyes, or arms - and also used for music, by Atau Tanaka), also used electromagnetic sensors, but on muscle groups.
Lots of interesting work is being done in organism-machine interconnection. Ferdinando A. Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern University has a robot controlled by the brain of a lamprey eel (I think that may have been on
Now, the twist on the Duke/MIT research is that the Internet was used as the communications medium between the brain and the robot. While this is not most useful for giving quadropalegics back some motion of themselves (they would be best served through a robotic exoskeleton for this purpose), they could telerobotically control a mobile robot to perform functions in the world for them. For someone who has great difficulties moving (and also for top-secret military experiments, I'm sure...) direct brain control of a telerobotic operator could certainly help in terms of giving them back some autonomy in grocery shopping, buying their medicines, etc. However, I think, psychologically people may have an easier time dealing with someone whose robot stays close to them - or that they wear, or that is attached to their wheelchair - at least in the short-term.
For some interesting philosophical discussions of Cyborgs and human-computer direct interfacing, see, among others, Hans Moravec, Donna Haraway, and the late Alexander Chislenko (http://www.lucifer.com/~sasha/home.html) - all of whom I don't necessarily agree with 100%, but have some interesting things to say...
Here are Dr. Nicolelis' web sites, if you want to read more than just NYT about his work:
http://nicolelis.neuro.duke.edu/
http://www.neuro.duke.edu/faculty/Nicoleli/Nico
...And Dr. Srinivasan at MIT:
http://webrle.mit.edu/rlestaff/p-srin.htm
As my friend "John Whorfin" always says...
HAR!
One would hope that NASA could design a system that wasn't quite that easily tampered with... They pretty much know where the sun is, for one thing, and... using the satellite's own telemetry readings as precedential over anything over the 'net... not look at the sun...
Also, presumably, the 5|z would need to figure out more complicated commands than just "look here" but rather how to simulate the patterns the system was looking for... let me rephrase what I said above: "hey satellite, here is some data" "hmmm, that looks like it might be interesting, let me look more closely over there..."
Finally, of course, you would put some constraints on what the thing was supposed to be doing, and some threshholds past which it would say "oh, someone is messing with me, I better inform a ground station and lock-out Internet access for a period..."
Yeah, no system is perfectly secure, but come on, give the folks at NASA a little credit here... SRL, which is a bunch of volunteers making robot performance art, could build a system where you could control a dangerous robot and not kill anyone, I suspect NASA can protect their satellites from having anything too stupid done with them...
Telerobotics over the Internet, especially Space telerobotics, is one of the cooler things being done online (it sure beats yet another porn server). Now, though this system doesn't yet allow telerobotic control of satellites, they do leave open the possibility for future flights. Survival Research Labs (www.srl.org) has already on several occasions opened up control of their various dangerous robots to Internet users, at some performances and installations, and it was a lot of fun for all involved. Controlling satellites would be at least as fun - not necessarily giving us control of their thrusters, but cameras and sample-collection arms would be cool.
E-commerce payments for custom satellite photos, though, opens up a whole new realm of spy technology for the business and consumer markets. Just think, punch in your credit card # and take a picture of that neighbor's yard that's all closed-in by a tall fence... Or your competitor's shipping depot... or whatever... Of course, geeks like us will instead (or also) want to buy custom picture of our favorite astronomical body - but I wonder which type of photos they were referring to in the announcement... hmmm...
Finally, I wonder... why aren't they testing a SETI@Home-like system where the satellite collects whatever data it collects, and users download processing software from a NASA ground station, receive data over the on-satellite server, process it and then... either send it to the ground station, or, in some applications, results could be sent back to the satellite and fed into software running on board that determines the satellite's next actions if the user's machine has uploaded some results which impact the task being carried out... THAT would be cool... SETI@Home-type work with real-time feedback loops with the satellites collecting the data... "Hey satellite, we think we found something, look more closely here..."
First off, MSIE does actually have another link back to M$... MSN is the default home page... big deal...
/.ers, but MSIE is better than Netscape, and Netscape's money-grubbing is doing nothing about this. While the Mozilla crew has done a great job with Mozilla, on Windows, at least, it lags behind MSIE. IE renders faster, and, horrors, is more stable. (This seems to be true on Linux, too... My Linux Netscape dumps core about every 5 minutes, whereas IE only does it about every 15 minutes...)
Now, this will come as heresy to
Plug-ins in IE are - just by empirical observation here folks - more stable, too. Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat, etc. all cause various problems on my Netscape installs, more so than under IE. Microsoft's JVM is better, as is their implementation of ECMA/JavaScript (embarrasingly for both Sun and Netscape, really). After being lambasted for being nothing but a marketing organization, Microsoft has put a lot of time and money into making the last couple versions of IE really good...
Netscape seems to have decided to take just the opposite approach and become nothing more than a marketing arm of AOL... all the good work is being done for by the Mozilla folks, and as volunteers they're having a hard time keeping up with the big bucks of M$. AOL seems to not give a damn about putting any money into the project to give the engineering effort a fighting chance against the stuff M$ is doing.
IE, at least on Windows, and in the versions I've tested on Linux, is just faster, more stable, more flexible in terms of add-ons it will accept without problems... better.
I'd like to see Mozilla kick their ass, but to do that, I think N$/AOhelL needs to do more than just sponge off their efforts and build links to annoying adverts...
There already was a Free Hardware Foundation, co-founded by my friend Jonathan Levine (it's even at http://www.fhf.org)... I guess because they're Candadians - or maybe it's because they're related to NetBSD instead of Linux or the Cambridge GNU crew in Cambridge - they don't count...
The Linux Community is too hyped on porting to new hardware, and too lax on simplification, and applications.
People use computers to do things, not just as fetish accessories. At least, most people do.
What applications will people run on a Linux handheld? Is someone working on a Linux Host and Handheld system similar to M$ Outlook and similar tools that would allow the primary users of handhelds (people trying to organize their lives) to actually organize contacts, communications, and calendar entries in a unified manner? The Qt/Embedded looked like it had at least the remote half of that pairing...
The Qt/Embedded interface photo looks nice - it even looks simple enough (something a lot of people don't feel about Linux on the desktop), though I don't yet know how complex it is to install (many still have difficulty installing Linux on their desktops - maybe they are idiots, or maybe just busy with the rest of their job... but a lot of these folks buy computers and if Linux wants to rule, the need to be taken into account...)
I love Linux, I love *nix in general, but the dearth of applications and difficulty of installation and maintenance makes it such that I can not use it in my organization, adn thus use it for work without at least as much hassle as using Windows. There is too much emphasis on "gee whiz" and not enough on real work (with the exception of real engineering work, but unfortunately business people, not engineers, control the market - even the computer market)...
I hope that these systems work as well as they look in the pictures, and maybe this will start Linux down the road of acceptance on the Business desktop if developers focus on the host-side applications as well...
It's just mutating...
Though there is still a place in the world, in my mind, for mid-to-large SIMD systems (SGI/Crays, Starfires, RS/6000s, etc.), this conference and other events are showing that cluster supercomputing and widely distributed computing (a'la SETI@Home, Distributed.Net, WebWorld, etc.) are also being taken seriously.
What drives any advances in hardware is applications that can take advantage of them. Supercomputing is not dead because on top of the usual uses (fluid dynamics modeling, codebreaking, etc.), the Internet and new algorithms in IR and AI are combining to compel people to want to approach Information Retrieval and understanding problems which are at the level of requiring supercomputing resources.
The company I work for (www.webmind.com) is building a hybrid AI system for IR and understanding (among other things) which is optimized to run not on a vector supercomputer but on a cluster of independent servers (though a nice MIMD supercomputer would be nice). With commodity hardware we have managed to get over 100GB of RAM and 200GHz of CPU for less than $500,000 for our first prototype of a large installation. A 6-64way IBM RS/6000 starts at $420,000.
Missing from the write-up (and possibly from the conference) are the folks at Starbridge Systems who are working on a "Hypercomputer" which has a field-reprogrammable topology. If any supercomputer company that needs it deserves venture capital funding, it's this one. The idea of allowing an application to change the network topology of the processors to optimize for its own data representation is extremely powerful - it's the next "big thing" in both MIMD supercomputing and networks for cluster supercomputing, IMNSHO.
SETI@Home is a very cool project, but it would be nice to have more about applications driving supercomputing at such conferences. Distributed.Net seems to get too little time since their client isn't as pretty as SETI, and also cluster supercomputing not over the Internet is being used for all sorts of cool stuff, and it would be especially interesting to hear more results about commodity clusters vs. proprietary large systems in areas like fluid dynamics modeling where the proprietary systems usually rule.
Also, more of a focus on evolutionary computing, FPGAs in supercomputer design, and information retrieval and understanding applications would be nice.
But overall, a good writeup of what looks like it was a pretty interesting and refreshingly diverse (not just "big iron" focused) SC conference...
Poor health information can have very severe consequences. My girlfriend's father is one of the top Radiation Ontologists in the world, and he also leads an R&D lab which is doing work in both radiation and genetic ontology. Much of th rest of her family are also top doctors in the areas of bioengineering, psychiatry, nutrition, etc. It is on their authority I can say that a number of health sites on the Net contain information which is genuinely dangerous to your health. The lack of regulation of these sites is exposing people to danger, and it is not only the right but the duty of governments to protect their people. Doing so in conjunction with health professionals - that is, calling in the experts to help create treaty and legislation - is the proper way to "get it right" (don't we wish Internet experts were called in for Internet law issues?)
.health would be a big boon to small sites run by qualified health professionals who would like to provide high-quality online information and services to people. It would at least mean that the information on the site was of sufficient quality to meet a set of criteria for suitability for patient use. Some of the larger health sites would really deserve to fail this certification at this point - and the result would hopefully be that they would improve their information and services in order to get a .health... and thus the consumer's life is improved.
Not only will this help the consumer, it will also help promote healthy competition in the business. In response to the poor-to-dangerous cancer information online, my girlfriend's father and I put together a preliminary site regarding cancer treatment. However, lacking any clear regulatory guidelines for online health sites, we had two predicaments:
1) What could we legally do? He wanted to build a FAQ, and respond to specific questions. In the United States, you need to be certified to practice medicine in each state... What level of advice would be in violation of which state laws? Could we only allow people from New York to visit the site? What about international visitors?
2) Restricting ourselves to the types of services existing sites seemed to be getting away with, how could a small site with two people and hardly any money compete with financially well-off sites, most of which were in the top 10 popularity but had poor quality cancer information? There was no way, on the Internet, for anyone to believe that our site was any better - and it certainly LOOKED more fly-by-night, despite the credentials of the doctor behind it.
Just being a WHO certified
I think we Internet geeks who support lobbying ICANN and other governmental, quasi-governmental, and pseudo-governmental organizations and monopolioes on behalf of making the Internet better for the people actually ON the Internet lobby ICANN to accept this proposal.
Isolation of naturally occurring DNA patterns should not be patentable under the patent law provisions which prohibit the raw products of nature. Elements in the periodic table, even transuranic elements which must be isolated in a laboratory, and for some of which there is no evidence as to whether or not they even form in nature, are not patentable. Why? They are raw products of nature. The same should hold for DNA sequences isolated from naturally occurring organisms.
p atenability
Modification of DNA sequences (of which
"purification" would be a form) would allow for patentability under existing patent law - or, at least, COULD allow for it if the resulting genes meets the legal challenges of utlity, novelty, and nonobviousness.
As with computer software algorithm patents, there are a few legal approaches to take in fighting them. One is that they are processes and not products, and thus not eligible for patentability - but the courts don't seem to be willing to buy this argument, though there are certainly some legal scholars who do. Another is that they are naturally occurring (that mathematical algorithms and DNA sequences both are naturally occurring), but this argument only applies to sequences found in nature, and in the case of algorithms - it is even trickier to decide what is "naturally occurring" and what isn't. Yet another is to protect a smaller, but fundamental, set of the domain from patents by selectively attacking specific patents and saying they are too fundamental to the domain to meet patent qualifications of nonobviousness and novelty. The patent system as it stands seems to be most amenable to this approach, though obviously it does the least to address wider issues of whether or not these things legitimately succumb to patentability.
However, letter of the law aside for a moment, biological patents are an interesting and contentious legal and bioethical issue. The questions of the ethical and moral implications of patenting the algorithms for generating living things are obviously leading to heated debates. This argument will also erupt with respects to software patents if true Artificial Intelligence is ever devised... in fact, some are already trying to lump in current Evolutionary Computing / Artificial Life code in such ethical arguments. Law and Ethics are not isomorphic, but legislators and judges certainly are succeptable to ethical and moral arguments, and thus this part of the discussion is also important to trying to map (or influence) future legal direction in these two oddly related areas.
A few good resources:
http://www.nih.gov/sigs/bioethics/
http://bioethics.gov/
http://www.law.ou.edu/lists/biolaw.html
http://genetics.law.utas.edu.au/
http://www.ethics.ubc.ca/brynw/law.html
http://www2.ari.net/foley/
Though it is a journal article that requires payment, this article may be interesting to people interested in biopatents:
http://www.biolawbusiness.com/abstract3-4.html#
All good points, especially about Euclidian thinking, though in spacetime the boundary of the universe is in time AND space... ;-)
As for why gravitational waves and not others... the different wavelength may mean the ability to pass through some interuniversal medium...
As for the gravitational shear making the universe uneven, this presumes no "super-bang" which evenly spread out a whole mess of universes pretty much uniformly through the metaverse...
But, really, this is all just amusing speculation... Don't mistake it with empirical or even real theoretical physics... I've not bothered to make calculations about this stuff, just make up stories...
You're just guessing... I am stating this from the past experience of at least one company operating in the SF Bay area. Even in teh US, some "obsolete" chips are more popular with hobbyists than the new ones - this company sold those over the counter to locals. The overseas operations disassembled boards, reclaimed useful parts (they defined useful according to their local markets), and extracted metal from the rest. The scrap plastic, I don't know what happened to it. Either landfill, or as road filler, would be my guess.
Some third world countries, like Brazil, where I am at this very moment in my company's Brazilian engineering office, where we have many excellent engineers, actually DO have legions of trained repair techs, and programmers, etc. India is another third world country that shares this trait, as is Russia. Of course, they also have lots of poor people, but a depressed economy is not isomorphic with everyone being technologically backwards and uneducated...
Unless you've actually left the US, and actually been involved with the computer recycling business, you are just making things up...
Regarding the other guy's note about UPS and FedEx trucks... I will assume he is right, though I know that the UPS truck that delivers in the industrial neighborhood in Brooklyn that I live in often returns empty, I will assume this route is an exception in the UPS system. Other shipping companies DO seem, however, to have lots of extra space - as some companies make a living pooling it and reselling it.
Of course, when others tried to do this, the big companies complained that this would throw the Internet into chaos - presuamably meaning they could not control the assignment of TLDs and thus get first dibs on prime names by knowing first what will be available.
However, if Internet users at large created a new TLD authority and open-source, open-license software that was reliable augmentation to DNS & BIND, then some serious alternative to centralized registry authority could be put forth.
The system could simply allow arbitrary TLDs, presumably bounded by a character limit, and domain names on a first-come, first-serve basis. The system would be distributed in a GNUtella-like fashion, and name conflict resolution would be performed by timestamp comparison.
Of course, this is just one idea, and a preliminary description of it... but there are only three other alternatives: whine uselessly, a class action lawsuit (if some lawyer thinks they can win the case, and in what country?) or form a lobby on behalf of general Internet users to try to change what ICANN is doing...
This argument is not based on fact. A good friend of mine was involved in the management of a sizable recycling company in the Bay Area for many years, and they not only helped keep many tons of electronic and metal scrap out of landfill, but they did it at a profit. Yes, that's right, a profit on recycling.
In fact, IBM will likely make a profit on this deal. You PAY them $29.99 for recycling AND they get to sell or reuse the parts? Hey, I'll give you THAT deal! First of all, most solid state parts don't go bad very easily, so there is plenty for them to recover. Secondly, reselling used computers in third world countries can be fairly lucrative.
The company my friend helped run did both of these things, plus metal recovery (which was actually their first business - recovery of gold from electronics assemblies to make jewelry). As with junked cars, the parts value can exceed the value of the assembled system once a certain age is past. However, if the system still works, it may be cheaper to just sell it used rather than expend the energy and time to disassemble it. Thus, this company, and presumably IBM, would dismantle the broken systems for parts or to recover precious metals, and sell the working ones overseas.
My friend's company did this in, if I recall correctly, Indonesia and the Phillipines. Regarding environmental issues. For second-hand resale, the energy and pollution in transport did NOT outweigh the manufacture and transport of new systems (the transport expenditure is basically the same, but you're manufacturing new stuff as well, so how could new be cheaper costwise or environmentally?) For scrapping, the way that the components parts business is set-up, there is already a lot of transport going on, so this was also actually cheaper on both counts. As for metal recovery: not digging new mines, or, worse for an over-mined commodity like gold, lots of test mines and horrible things like sifter mines, gave quite a financial and environmental benefit.
Recycling of many items, especially complex machines, is not only environmentally sound, but can be quite lucrative. IBM is really quite brilliant for doing this, especially since, being IBM, they can do it with minimal additional transport costs?
Why? Most recycling moves through recycling centers. If IBM puts these at their distribution centers, to move the recycled equipment, you're mostly moving it in trucks which otherwise would be returning empty from distribution centers. In terms of home users shipping back via UPS, the financial cost is a little greater, but not really the environmental: again, you're primarily using empty space. Most UPS (and FedEx, and whatever) trucks return mostly empty to their depots. Someone else I knew well wrote the truck routing software for a major "less than truckload" shipper: their business is to resell the empty space on trucks. By making use of "waste" services to move waste goods, you're so far doing quite well financially and environmentally.
The disassembly process is also almost never more expensive or environmentally damaging than manufacturing, and certainly resale of used systems is pretty obviously without any added environmental cost.
If you know anything about the businesses of recycling and shipping, you realize that IBM has made a really smart move: if they know how to manage all this stuff properly (or if they partnered with folks who do), they'll make a profit AND get the PR bonus of being an "environmentally friendly" company.
Kudos to IBM...
In the VR industry, stuff like this has been done for years ranging from cameras detecting light reflective points placed on the body,
magnetic field systems, muscle current detection, eye movement tracking, suits and gloves and helmets with multi-position switches, spring or memory metal tension measurements, infrared distance measurements, etc. There is a plethora of systems of various price and quality, and the leaders in this industry are Polhemus and Fakespace, with a few new folks who are consolidating the remains of failed companies and producing new stuff.
The VR industry was too early, like the AI industry, and failed to deliver on all its promise - and thus failed commercially. Also like AI, a resurgence seems to be building. However, I hope this time we can separate hype from reality (and dumb ideas from useful ones).
As you may have noticed when you move around real 3D space, you don't just use one part of your body. So, controlling movement through a 3D simulation with just your head seems a bit ridiculous. Why is it more ridiculous than using your hands to control a joystick? When you use a joystick, you are using your hands for their purpose: to manipulate small physical objects. This is then converted into movement in the simulation algorithmically, and (primarily since we're used to driving motorized vehicles) we're pretty good at mentally interpreting our hand movements into planar movement (and even some 3D movement) in 3D space.
Now, if you look at the VR and telerobotics community, what use is head tracking? It is usually used in conjunction with hand (or whole body) control of motion, in order to control field of view. That is: your body or hands control movement, and you use your head to look around. Sounds familiar. That's the point.
So, if you combine decent head tracking (and the technology they use does not seem decent) with joysticks or gloves or suits, you're on your way to something (Fakespace has a nice system called the Boom which is fairly good for both moving and looking around). The problem is, can you get the response time necessary for your mind to associate the movement of your head with what your eyes are getting back from the screen.
First off, the bezel on the CRT may interfere sufficiently with your field of vision that your mind loses track of the association between head tracking and "looking around" in the simulation (or game). Serious VR and telerobotic apps with lots of funding use periscopes (like on the Boom), goggles, or helmets to ensure that association by immersion into the environment.
Experienced gamers may have overcome the motion sickness from non-immersive motion sufficiently to not have this problem, but the differing nature of the head-tracking vs. joystick (or keyboard) game movement may be such that you still have a period where you have to adjust by playing A LOT and getting used to the sensation - that is, training your mind to perceive this weird world you now inhabit.
So, it may be fun to use such a hybrid system, if the technology is there. However, camera-based tracking technology has the worst tracking resolution and response time so far. Worse, this system is going to be highly succeptable to image noise - a problem Biovision and others got around by using reflectors you place on your body and associate with points of movement that the software maps each point on the body to. What their system seems to be doing is trying to handle this with motion vector extraction of the whole image received, and/or diffing the image and using quadrants or octants to translate changes into on-screen motions (unfortunately, I could not try this out to verify).
Such a methodology is (a) slow (especially since the tracking computations are being done on the machine that is already bogged-down rendering the game - VR apps are often multi-CPU) and (b) not terribly accurate... So, this system, in my analysis, is just hype. It is no new direction in gaming, rather an old one poorly rehashed.
I suggest that you stick with joysticks and keyboards until the good stuff becomes more affordable...
A good visualization allows a good set of data to more readily be converted into the knowledge the user is seeking by analyzing the data. It adds information to the data through the visual arrangement, allowing humans - who are better at visual pattern recognition than numerical or textual pattern recognition - to quickly mine out the information they need.
t s.asp?from=bookinfo&Au=Tufte%2C+Edward+R%2 E&Ti=&Su=&Pu=&RegAction=t&SearchFunction=reg&qorde r=title
Wile the Antarcti.ca idea is cool, and the design is visually attractive (at least, to me), I find that the presentation of the information could use some additional work. The sites that are listed are plotted as points on a map of "Antarctica" representing the Net - but the distance between points and their relative positioning does not seem to carry any particular meaning (at least, the sites I linked to from this site did not seem to have easily discernable traits which would make the distances meaningful)
The site is certainly attractive, but I think the integration of a system of text similarity measurement and positioning of the sites based on these metrics would greatly enhance the utility of the site (or, if this is already being done, it is not being done very well and needs improvement)
Also, the site will not be able to grow very large without a better notion of clustering based on some actually meaningful site comparison metrics (text similarity, google-like popularity measurements, etc.), since in order to have millions of sites on the map the idea they have implemented of moving around the map will need to be combined with some notion of places on the map having greater semantic meaning and also to reduce clutter, a more dynamic system of display which allows for better "zoom in / out" type functionality to "drill-down" into areas of interest based on representative, canonical sites that would appear on the high-level map.
All the beginnings are there, and it is a good start, I hope this goes somewhere...
By the way...
Anyone who thinks this field is cool, check out (if you haven't already) the books by Edward Tufte (I've put a reference at the bottom). And if you think you'd like to make some competing visualizations, check out this really great start-up data relationship viz tool company which my company is considering partnering with: www.thinkmap.com
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Tufte's Books:
http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/Search/SearchResul
The universe is the largest gravitationally bound structure in the universe, since sets can include themselves... But, really, I digress ;-)
:-)
Or, do I. The possibility exists that what we observe as our detectable universe is a gravitationally bound structure which is immersed in a large collection of similar structres. Currently, this would be pure speculation, but it is feasible that as these distant structures are studied in more detail gravitational effects which indicate some other very large masses outside the bounds of what we can detect as the edge of our universe are discovered. This could, of course, just mean that more large galaxy clusters lurk outside our range of detection, or it could be that an effect sufficiently severe be discovered that it appears that maybe another extremely large gravitationally bound cluster - one we might wish to call another "universe" - existed.
Right now, of course, this is all just speculation... but it's fun speculation
As a manager, I'll give my management perspective :->
In our organization communcation is actually enhanced through the use of flex-time. We have offices in NY, California, Brazil, New Zealand, and Australia, and clients in the US and Europe. With all these timezones, it is to our great benefit to allow people to come in to their office at odd hours when they are working with people in another office - and since the people who work with each other can change depending on the project being done and thus what groups need to interact, it isn't the case that we can just have different shifts to handle this.
We also have part-time telecommuting privledges, which not only gives people some time to work quietly and alone on difficult technical problems, but also people who live far away can spend some commute time each week on work, and also in the office we can share desks between people who come in 2-3 days a week on different days (important to us because we're in NY city where space is hard to find and rents are high once you find it).
However, the argument onion2k makes about "doing what you like when you like to do it" is also pretty compelling - at least in our organization where about 80% or more of the staff really like their jobs a lot. People are genuinely more productive at their personal peak hours of the day, and we have people who do their best work when they come in at 6am, and others who would rather show up at 11am and work until past midnight. We just require that people who work on the same project overlap in work times at least 4 hours each day. Those employees who are not as in love with their jobs, or who have displayed less of an ability to work well alone, or who have to meet with clients - they do get some time restrictions placed on them, but even then, with some flexibility (say, come in between 8:30am and 10:30am, except if meetings dictate otherwise, and stay at least 8 hours, and no telecommuting unless working over 40 hours in the week... as an example)
Managing people on flexible schedules, even ones that minimally overlap with your own, is not so bad if they actually respond to e-mails and produce measurable results in their work. As a software engineering organization our company has a pretty easy time telling whether or not projects are being completed and people are being productive, especially since our managers are technical and can distinguish an employee who is not really working from one who has run up against an unforseen technical difficulty.
So, if your managers are up to it both emotionally and in terms of knowledge of their work to allow for judging performance fairly, then flex-time (and part-time telecommuting) can be really great...