Great now DHS can go back to library policing? Not. DHS could still be involved in something useful with cyber security, maybe they could even look at how good coverity's process is. Just don't tell me DHS will still spend millions to just duplicate work.. now they learn what a community really is.
The other was a dedicated word processor I think by WANG which we used in our school newspaper around 1982 or so. 8" disks, green phosphor portrait display showed a page at a time. Some other mysterious master disks did other things too but this was basically a word processor only. It felt like you were typing on the page which was shown completely at all times, and you could use arrow keys to move and start typing at any cursor position on the page. This was a wonderful, wonderful word processor, simple and quick and sweet.
If anybody knows where I can get for linux emulators and software files please let me know, thank you. Compared to these, I am sorry but neither of the Offices makes me happy. At least I demand the same performance as in 1982 and these days it should at least be easy to make up a simple two column brochure or document that looks somewhat readable, not the big block o' text that Word usually outputs as its final output of a page. Yeesh. There is something to be said for just typing the stuff up and throwing every last one of those menus and dialogs into the garbage can. With the Wang we balled up printouts (which came out instantaneously too) and tossed them into the trash with glee! We used pencil on the printouts and then editted on the screen. Instead when I spend a day in front of word (black on white, not green on black either!) I get de-energized, glazed eyes, even nauseated (Word on XP too). I may be "processing" but it is definitely NOT the last word in word processing. Someone should put some working versions of the old machines into a library or museum so you can actually try them. You'd be F*ing amazed.
Thanks for your very interesting comment, it sounds like you live an exciting life! Point well taken. Perhaps government(s) will start to outreach more to open source software developers and this is just the beginning of a good thing, and granted perhaps one of the best and least destructive things DHS could choose to do.
It seems to me that both the DHS and the open source community would benefit from a broad discussion of how DHS can and should contribute, in particular if they are spending millions maybe they could hire some good people and write/create some open source code we could all use.
DHS seems to have talked to antivirus companies, maybe they could do a Slashdot interview or better yet start a mailing list/website/sourceforge project? Like you were mentioning that call from the NSA is quite interesting. I'm writing some business software that will probably need to support SSL and clients may need that but not in fact require checking certs either. I spent tons of time in the past deciphering how to be a Certificate Authority with open ssl just to get a small project working, maybe the NSA or DHS could write tutorials on that even. Anyway, thanks for your response. Hoping a DHS person is reading this and realizes there are lots of things they could help with, but they need to get the experts involved if they aren't yet. If they could get a cyberwar chief to ensure apache is safe that's great but they already are claiming it has bugs in 0.03% of its lines, so they need to tell us what they are.
Follows the Japan trend of department stores. In any given location there will be three chains: The winner, the runner up, and the pitiful loser. Vodaphone is giving up too soon, but I'm sure glad to hear this. I almost got my business partner to sign up with me for new vodaphone phones because of an unlimited $3/month for unlimited dialing! And I'm paying $200 in mobile phone bills. I also almost bought a phone from them that could work in the U.S. too. Wanted it that day for a trip. But no, you have to go to another store to get the free chip put in, and the lines were too long so I couldn't buy it. Vodaphone didn't have what it took, whereas Softbank will probably do something intelligent with them. It was a brief flash in the pan, good riddance!
It would be very useful if they could do some of the following, if in fact DHS was supposed to be in this business which I doubt, it is really a very gray area. But they seem to have free time on their hands so a wish list:
Tell authors about bugs they find, as they find it
Submit bugs via the project's bug submission system
Develop a bug submission standard object format and open testing methodology, maybe even a server and some ontology to help automate this stuff?
Teach developers ways not to make those bugs again
Develop open automated bug checkers
Allocate money to hire programmers to fix important bugs in important open source packages
Establish a government certification of quality which will be fabulous for open source
Disclose a roadmap to certification for any given software
Certify private and academic labs for similar certification
But note that the DHS was established to fight terrorist attacks. Anybody doing this kind of service for OSS and able to provide a certification is nice, but the only valid reason for DHS to do this is if they have special knowhow about potential vulnerabilities of software to cyberwar (NOT - they are using antivirus firms instead of the military to get knowhow) this is really not in their purvue.
I am troubled by DHS goons' bullying of people for library use, parking violations, underage drinking or whatever is the latest thing they have to pass the boredom. Cyber security is a great area but they could do best by establishing tools for bug detection and safe code writing. In fact while a government certification and free bug testing is nice it is not what they are supposed to be doing.
Neat, thanks. I did look at some horse photos (unfortunately not so easy to see live horses where I live in Tokyo). The front knees bend like a person's but the back legs are much longer and the knee joint goes the opposite direction. Though I haven't studied horse musculature yet, can't tell what is going on in the upper rear leg i.e. how those big thigh muscles get attached. I wonder if the robot has both knees facing each other for stability, more like matched pogo sticks than a horse maybe. I'd have to check muybridge but the robot seems to have a gait in which two diagonally opposed legs move forward at the same time. Perhaps this is not really the way horses move.. interesting topic, thanks.
The recovery when kicked closely resembles a colt, but the grisly dancing around on level ground is reeeaaly creepy and looks like two people holding a stretcher between them. I was thinking it would do better with arms (how many? do they do the wave?) milling around but then horses do okay without arms don't they. It seems the tilting of the main body and jumping in the air has a similar effect. (Though skiers and snowboarders can do better by lowering their mass close to the ground, hands close to the surface.) So anyway this is a horse-stretcher thing. Probably could run if they turned one pair of legs around but then maybe other problems would crop up.
That uncanny valley thing has something going for it but what.. this looks like a enemy a la Dr. Who. Actually the movie started out looking like a bad scifi flick! I mean the shapeless, bandlike legs are wrapped in amorphous swaths of black cloth for pete's sake!
I have often imagined it would be nice to have a simple robotic aid walking along beside me to carry a computer bag or suitcase, and imagine wheels or some rotating feet. Maybe a little tank tread, for example in Tokyo they have things on a single tank tread in train stations to lift bales of newspapers over stairs and walk it across the station. But this is another story. The tank treads or something cute and well balanced would evince a "cool!" or "neat!" or "how smart!" reaction. This however evinces revulsion, it looks anemic, sick, taken over by parasites, etc. It looks like it spends most of its time actually bouncing up and down or meaninglessly moving diagonally with no clear idea of the direction it should be going in. Looks like the head is in the rear even though who knows. Anyway a few more generations and it and a few hundred of its friends ought to be able to lug all kinds of explosives up into Osama's cave so you know there's a lot more of this coming. Looks more like a PR thing to scare people.. but technically it's pretty impressive.
Following a recent request from Armor, NASA also included English/Metric units -- millimeters, centimeters, meters, and kilometers -- to support European customers and aerial photography.
So NASA is still operating in non-metric units, they created a laser measuring device which TFA suggests is measured with software outputting non-metric units though we don't know if they use the decimal system or say 1/16 inch, they had to be requested to add SI (systeme internationale, or metric) units, TFA has to explain what SI units are, TFA then uses the ambiguous word English which in measurements usually indicates non-metric, bushel and foot-pound quaintness even beyond the American units. Maybe NASA doesn't feel comfortable with SI and so is trying not to standardize on it or appear to be an expert on it? When's the next bit of space hardware due to get a nervous breakdown due to a need for inches and degrees fahrenheit?
A cynical strategy they knew it would come to this
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AMD Subpoenas Skype
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I used to work with a company that made sound synthesis and performance software, Intel provided money because they were constantly looking for apps that required heavy duty processors. You just don't need a 3 GHz processor for Microsoft Office! -- Unless something sneaky like intentional bloating, etc. is going on. Intel knew this probably would't fly, but they undoubtedly gave Skype a pile of money to do it anyway. Intel has in return gotten fabulous PR, that their CPUs are much more powerful than Skypes. Everyone on/. knows it! Intel monopolistic? Not so important to many people, nor so newsworthy. Skype likewise probably thought it had a good chance of being able to get by without a lawsuit against themselves directly, and probably Intel will pay for any legal fees they incur. In the end Intel is feeling the pressure, but good! And this is proof that they have now got to stoop so low as to hire software companies to cripple their software in order to make Intel look good.
A new root system would be nasty but on the other hand if you are going to aim nukes at the guys running the network you might as well build your own network too just in case no?
But it may not be as bad as all that. Not that I think it is a great idea, but Japan for example is starting domain naming in Japanese characters (hiragana and katakana alphabets, or kanji which are basically Chinese characters). So you need UTF-8 and Japanese font display and input support just to type in the domain name.
Check out this page which says it is ICANN authorized plus it offers.jp domains in kanji ("IDN multilingual domains") side by side with English ones.
I also note that i-dns.net in California supports root domains and they provide soft keyboard java applets to input them. I don't know anybody using them, though a 2000 press release mentions a couple well known companies in Japan, but I can see that the top selection in the dropdown menu (read as "koushi" or public in Japanese, though it is really Chinese which I can't read) is possibly what they will use for ".com" for example the Japanese versions use "kaisha" (company) and "netto" (net) as.com and.net equivalents it seems.
I found a 2002 Internet Draft from JPNIC on this sort of thing. It seems to me the biggest problem is that you have to be able to read a language to access an address written in that language. May be useful for old folks but at present it seems to be quite unpopular in Japan.
According to this,
The Ares V is actually a rescue mission (not a great choice of names eh but that's Mars for you) NASA sends in 2030, two years early. They decided to get a jump on history instead this time around. There is no Ares I, that's Viking maybe. They mean Ares IV which fits the published Trek timeline. Artemis is the project to get private individuals to the Moon, and a magazine , also from here "Artemis (Diana) was Goddess of the Moon. She was daughter the son of Zeus and Leto, and twin sister to Apollo. He symbols include the bow and qrrow, hunting dogs, deer, and geese." Which means they will have a very cool mission logo. And she's a virgin. The Ares missions will also have cool logos and they will look good next to the logo with the virgin Artemis on it.
Altair obviously is not named after some star in Aquila. It is named after the MITS Altair 8800 which was an instant, overwhelming success and its bus became the de facto standard.. and the 8800 was in turn named after a star in Star Trek and not in Aquila. See the emulator. Though these guys think the 8800 was named after the movie Forbidden Planet, but it could also have been Altair sf magazine, which probably was named after a star in Aquila. Of course Altair also means "the flyer" in Arabic which is better than considering it an ill-starred lover. Though any of the above would provide for great mission logos too. Anyway it is difficult to work out who named what since the 8800 was named after the star Altair that the Starship Enterprise was heading for, but the Space Shuttle Enterprise was obviously named after the Star Trek Starship, or maybe after a balloon, or a seafaring ship, and probably not Branson's suborbital.
They need to get together with the guys who built the quantum computer in the next thread over. That way they can do nothing and see a big decrease in illegal copying.
First is to get the money managed properly. It is stupid to say 1 billion will be spent over ten years. Put it in a fund and spend 100 million or whatever the interest is, every year forever.
Google already has technical, philosophical and business tools that can work.
I have some experience with NGO activities. Mainly spearheaded by a famous journalist and supported on the web by me over maybe 10 years, with many other people accreting around the personality of this journalist. Granted one website I made attracted a quarter million dollars in donations, with nothing but our sweat. But to tell you the truth it was mostly his. That site, and projects of his own for example building in Cambodia their best hospital, a free newspaper, 200 schools, an orphanage, and so on are mainly I think successes due to his extraordinary 1) stubbornness, 2) unstinting generosity, 3) going to where the problem is, and 4) pulling in a lifetime of favors, sponsors, supporters, donors, etc. Maybe #1 is the biggest.
Always I have been limited in what I could offer due to a need to support myself elsewhere, and not going to the problem area myself. Conversely, he didn't always come out of it in one piece, he had a stroke once somewhere you really don't want that to happen.
Anyway, Google needs an army of people like that maybe based of small teams, each for a certain area, and Google is going to have an ops center like the U.S. army in Florida which however is going to be far away from the real problem not even in the same time zone. They need to assemble go-getter teams to identify and solve problems and give them real support.
There are long term Google-like things they can do of course like supporting open source, compiling educational and how-to manuals, printing and distributing that info, etc. But most of the areas are going to need people on the ground with solid support, and a committment to learning what works and multiplying it. Maybe it will be good to spread info through the Internet and hook people in the 3rd world into it, and maybe not. A big problem in many of my own suggestions were that these countries have nothing but a massive amount of pride and a horrible history. Often there is an obvious fix that would require help from the country next door.. like an Internet line, or phone service via an existing satellite. Massive political problems. Maybe the army wants to take over that nice net connection you are bringing in, or maybe radio signals will be bad for your health. (One project in Cambodia used steel shipping containers for schoolrooms since they were impervious to bullets.) Maybe there are no phones. Villages may be too far away from each other for easy communication. There may be deadly diseases and unhealthy water which are the biggest problems (so we have a malaria nets campaign). Maybe jealousies, misunderstandings, criminals will be a problem (I know we had a guard killed once, who was guarding Macintoshes for the newspaper).
I was a coordinator for the Science and Technology in Society Forum in Japan (stsforum.org). According to a guest from Nigeria, before solving with IT the problems were lack of firewood and even bigger, a brain drain to the cities. And there was a major problem in him just getting visa and travel to Japan where the forum was held. We took a poll, who thought such problems would be solved by politicians and who thought by engineers.
Well, both I and a very nice VP from Intel said engineers and everyone else said politicians. I think the real answer is: On the ground people with an engineering, problem solving mindset, with political and technical support. I lean toward the "engineers" choice still but it is clear that we are not talking about armchair geeks (though they have a very important role in executing solutions once specifications are determined), we are talking about Solution Engineers, people who understand technologies (including but not just Internet) and communication. Google funding travel expenses so it is easy for people to get t
Just to be wacky I'll post what I look for, I want jobs for an expert with my experience and skillset that specifically want someone to do a certain job, freelance, and it can be done off-site. Jobs for a creative, experienced freelance programmer, requiring good communication and experience, but specifically not requiring a geographical location nearby or even in the U.S. I tried other sites and they didn't work. It seems wierd because I know these jobs exist, and I get them when I spend time selling myself to companies. If I for example have a good deal of experience in a specific area, with products I've made and great clients, then I ought to be able to beat out a college kid, a Chinese programmer, or an Indian outsourcer. Like jobs.perl.org.
I don't know if it's in the U.S. yet but yesterday for the first time, I saw in a Tokyo shop two G-shock watches that have TV/VCR remote controls with infrared transmitters. One was just channel up/down and volume up/down, the other also had standard vcr controls, I mean dedicated buttons on the watch. A big red transmitter at the top. So I guess if you frequent pubs with tv sets etc you can be annoying. Don't know if this has any use as an irda device. Must be programmable..
TFA sucked but wading through the net produced these notes and links.
Here or here, a very nice article on the project, "Margaret Turnbull and Jill Tarter have a new list, called HabCat: A Catalog of Nearby Habitable Stellar Systems." (2003) Interview included.
Interesting that starting with the Hipparcos catalog of 120,000 stars and skipping all with major problems for life ("cataclysmic, eruptive, pulsating, rotating, or X-ray stars", low metal content systems, rotating too fast or too much UV or bad size or composition), left 1 star in 6 still potential life bearers.
Wiki on HabCat and Turnbull.
The Turnbull page has a link to a PDF, which is a very interesting scientific paper about how the list of habitable stars was made.
Wiki article on the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which uses Turnbull's list of 5000 candidates within a 100 light year radius. List of Top 100 candidates. Note 18 Scorpii at 46 light years is number 62 in the list, and 37 Geminorum is not listed.
The highest ranked 2 candidates in that list are just 4 ly away from Earth, at Rigil Kentaurus, and then Tau Ceti at 12 ly. There is one at 3 ly and some others at 19, 20, 24 ly too.
Turnbull's top 10 list includes 51 Pegasus, where in 1995 Swiss astronomers spotted the first planet outside our solar system, a Jupiter-like giant.
Others include 18 Sco in the Scorpio constellation, which is very similar to our own sun; epsilon Indi A, a star one-tenth as bright as the sun; and alpha Centauri B, part of the closest solar system to our own.
Seems like this is just in time. This is perfect timing for people who are starting to smell smoke to respond.. whether it is a New York Times article or the man who asked if Google was ashamed. It seems clear that this kind of a chip, built by Lenovo and sold in China, could if used intelligently by the government, be FAR MORE DANGEROUS than whatever Google is doing. Just put a phone home to Beijing into Microsoft Office Chinese edition and force an upgrade to that functionality along with fingertip swiping. Add a camera like the Sony Vaio has which faces you, and you get a match of face to fingerprint to email address, from there a match to your home address if the ISP cooperates (they do), and all your correspondence and business documents forwarded to the government's petabyte storage which any number of U.S. companies will sell them in a heartbeat if they can't roll their own.
The point is that U.S. media companies and the terrorized U.S. have allowed breathtakingly broad rules and now technologies to be put in place, putatively for safety, and the U.S. government and corporations have worked heart to promulgate this around the world.
However, these rules and technologies are in fact so far from what was general thinking in the U.S. say 20 years ago that the Chinese government can now smirkingly say a week or so ago that their censorship and disclosure practices are in line with those of the rest of the world. And the surveillance tools being inserted into consumer items at the behest of the U.S. government and corporations are in fact tools that reduce freedom of everyone and can indeed be used even more effectively and chillingly in nations that started out with less freedom in the first place.
As it happens, timing has worked out so marvelously one might wonder if there is an unseen law of sociology at work. Incidents like the Sony rootkit and Homeland security being sent home by a librarian are coming up at approximately the same time that the most venerable U.S. computer firm sold its computer manufacturing to a Chinese firm and a U.S. congressman and Holocaust survivor is demanding black and white ethics from the Yahoo and Google.
Timing is perfect to wash away the bullshit and leave in razor-etched glory the facts, the players, and the route that must be taken by western civilization.
Don't know who you are, but I have nothing against windows per se. Well actually I do hate the corporate marketing angle that constantly crops up in MS software but that is not my point. I have no proof such as you demand, and do not think Media Player is a rootkit at this point in time. However it does seem that Microsoft will like Sony have to do something with the OS and/or media players to control operations. By the way though it was not a target of my comment, actually Windows has often hidden files from me, but it is a "feature" you know, for newbies presumably. There is a gray line between feature design and self-serving corporate strategy, like there is a gray line between services and rootkits. Though personally I think a rootkit is a tool used to allow its deployer to gain superuser access to your machine. If MS produces someting in the future to disable key functionality of your DVD or cpu this is a rootkit in my book and the specs of these new DVDs seem to require it. (you can read those specs yourself)
Interesting. I will wait with interest to see whether any such legislation can be created that does not also force a ruling against the software embedded in new DVD drives that will let remote attackers brick your hardware. In particular, this will be quite fun if there is a system driver that gets installed (r00tkit!) which enforces the process across all copy operations. I think the definition of rootkit is a slippery sliding thing and you could even say Microsoft supplies them if you didn't know about it when purchasing Windows, or if it gets installed in an automated update (e.g. of Media Player).
Caveat, the author is a friend of mine. Toshio Iwai is a well known digital media artist who has done a number of works in which you compose music in one way or another, often using some kind of objects you can manipulate. Sometimes as simiple as a bouncy bal, other times you are herding a fleet of lights bouncing musically through a matrix like sound fireworks. So some of the things in the game are evolutions of some of his works. For example the donut spinners.. in recent years he has worked with displays projected from above onto a white table or in this case a white turntable.. you spin the turntable with your hand and something like a donut in the game appears. These displays are neat because you can make virtual controls sensed from above or below, giving an interesting non-crt tactile feel. Anyway, I also wanted to save things I made but it seems this may have been an artistic decision.. or possibly a technical limitation. One thing you may like to know is that at the Electroplankton launch in La Foret hall in Harajuku, Tokyo, the president of Nintendo came and gave a talk with Iwai and said the DS was made to a musical and interactive specifications so that it could play Electroplankton. There is also a wikipedia article about it. Incidentally a FAQ at gamefaqs says it is not a game because "Electroplankton has no measurable
objective; you can't 'complete', 'finish', 'win' or 'succeed' at playing it." However I got a massive amount of enjoyment out of it and electroplankton is the necessary and sufficient reason I'd have for buying a DS, I think this definition of game and need to fit into even one's idea of what will sell is unneccessary. For example I went to XBOX Live! which is a large bar lounge Microsoft set up in Omotesando, Tokyo (near La Foret) and tried a couple games for the XBOX in particular one where you direct armies to fight each other and you have magical berserker powers. Without instructions I found it initially interesting but so hard to win, so shallow, and so painful on the fingers that after 30 games or so I just gave up and never want to look at the place again. For me anyway Electroplankton beats that "showcase game" hands down.. a different audience perhaps. I'd rather thank Nintendo for doing it and hope it sells enough for them to make more like it! P.S. also it beats hands down the Fly Pen I got my nephews for Christmas, by about 100x. It would be worth it to figure out how to hook up an amp to it and record to a pc.. heck worth buying a DS for them too I think. And better for their brains than yet another Harry Potter adventure though they love those too.
Granted Google Desktop is free (as is enterprise edition for now too, except support is $10K/yr), there is a very funny side to this too. Most people these days have *way* too much memory and CPU, considering the tasks for which they are using their machines. I mean computing, not realtime 3D rendering, sound synthesis or maneuvering bloated app bits around. The computing side of machines. Personal computers these days have enough power these days to run powerful search engines of their own without farming it across the net. I myself am very happy Google is doing this since last year I designed a simple program that has some of the same functionality and now I can point to Google and say "but my system is safer". How long until those neat ethernet equipped hard disks come with similar searching/rsyncing features? Anyway I keep rating everything I see against the BeOS (now Zeta) live search query folders. So far that is the best darned thing I've seen.
Leave your tokens at the office/home and call your coworker/wife. Won't work in an underground data center though, unless you can run fast. I don't think I'd recommend a webcam.
WxPerl makes me happy and seems at this point to provide maximum power for minimum effort, and being sufficiently mature at this point in time. VisualBasic has made me very unhappy whenever I have used it in the past.
WxPerl is Perl bindings to wxwindows which itself is a cross-platform C++ based library that can be used from C, or from Python and Perl (and maybe some others). Depending on what you want to do maybe a lightweight language like Perl could make you very happy too.
If you use VisualBasic you may find it possible to get a simple job done relatively quickly but if it ever turns around, bites your butt and grinds your bones between its molars, don't say I didn't warn you. That said, it is certainly possible that it has gotten better than last time I used it some years ago, but to me it reeks. I am biased though, towards Perl and linux. You can look at the successful projects made with wxwindows at wxwindows.org.
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Great now DHS can go back to library policing? Not. DHS could still be involved in something useful with cyber security, maybe they could even look at how good coverity's process is. Just don't tell me DHS will still spend millions to just duplicate work.. now they learn what a community really is.
- Apple P.I.E. (Programmers' Interactive Editor). This actually was a real word processor, not a code writing editor. It had a jump to last positions function (keypad 0) and lots of wonderful mindjarring but beloved control sequences. Had a great manual too. This was for the Apple ][. If anyone has a copy please send it to me - I don't know how to read my old floppy disks!
- The other was a dedicated word processor I think by WANG which we used in our school newspaper around 1982 or so. 8" disks, green phosphor portrait display showed a page at a time. Some other mysterious master disks did other things too but this was basically a word processor only. It felt like you were typing on the page which was shown completely at all times, and you could use arrow keys to move and start typing at any cursor position on the page. This was a wonderful, wonderful word processor, simple and quick and sweet.
If anybody knows where I can get for linux emulators and software files please let me know, thank you. Compared to these, I am sorry but neither of the Offices makes me happy. At least I demand the same performance as in 1982 and these days it should at least be easy to make up a simple two column brochure or document that looks somewhat readable, not the big block o' text that Word usually outputs as its final output of a page. Yeesh. There is something to be said for just typing the stuff up and throwing every last one of those menus and dialogs into the garbage can. With the Wang we balled up printouts (which came out instantaneously too) and tossed them into the trash with glee! We used pencil on the printouts and then editted on the screen. Instead when I spend a day in front of word (black on white, not green on black either!) I get de-energized, glazed eyes, even nauseated (Word on XP too). I may be "processing" but it is definitely NOT the last word in word processing. Someone should put some working versions of the old machines into a library or museum so you can actually try them. You'd be F*ing amazed.I found references here which says it was made by Robert (aka Rupert) Lissner in 1984 and was the basis for AppleWorks. But here mentions the late David Gordon of Programma International which sounds more correct to me, and capitalizes the PIE. Lissner's was written in Assembler apparently, though Gordon's was too probably. Anyway I always think about how quick and easy it was when I use OpenOffice.org which (not a troll) brings my 128MB Dell Inspiron 7.5K/RH9 to its knees. If anyone has a copy on the net somewhere let me know - can't convert my floppies easily.
It seems to me that both the DHS and the open source community would benefit from a broad discussion of how DHS can and should contribute, in particular if they are spending millions maybe they could hire some good people and write/create some open source code we could all use.
DHS seems to have talked to antivirus companies, maybe they could do a Slashdot interview or better yet start a mailing list/website/sourceforge project? Like you were mentioning that call from the NSA is quite interesting. I'm writing some business software that will probably need to support SSL and clients may need that but not in fact require checking certs either. I spent tons of time in the past deciphering how to be a Certificate Authority with open ssl just to get a small project working, maybe the NSA or DHS could write tutorials on that even. Anyway, thanks for your response. Hoping a DHS person is reading this and realizes there are lots of things they could help with, but they need to get the experts involved if they aren't yet. If they could get a cyberwar chief to ensure apache is safe that's great but they already are claiming it has bugs in 0.03% of its lines, so they need to tell us what they are.
Follows the Japan trend of department stores. In any given location there will be three chains: The winner, the runner up, and the pitiful loser. Vodaphone is giving up too soon, but I'm sure glad to hear this. I almost got my business partner to sign up with me for new vodaphone phones because of an unlimited $3/month for unlimited dialing! And I'm paying $200 in mobile phone bills. I also almost bought a phone from them that could work in the U.S. too. Wanted it that day for a trip. But no, you have to go to another store to get the free chip put in, and the lines were too long so I couldn't buy it. Vodaphone didn't have what it took, whereas Softbank will probably do something intelligent with them. It was a brief flash in the pan, good riddance!
- Tell authors about bugs they find, as they find it
- Submit bugs via the project's bug submission system
- Develop a bug submission standard object format and open testing methodology, maybe even a server and some ontology to help automate this stuff?
- Teach developers ways not to make those bugs again
- Develop open automated bug checkers
- Allocate money to hire programmers to fix important bugs in important open source packages
- Establish a government certification of quality which will be fabulous for open source
- Disclose a roadmap to certification for any given software
- Certify private and academic labs for similar certification
But note that the DHS was established to fight terrorist attacks. Anybody doing this kind of service for OSS and able to provide a certification is nice, but the only valid reason for DHS to do this is if they have special knowhow about potential vulnerabilities of software to cyberwar (NOT - they are using antivirus firms instead of the military to get knowhow) this is really not in their purvue.I am troubled by DHS goons' bullying of people for library use, parking violations, underage drinking or whatever is the latest thing they have to pass the boredom. Cyber security is a great area but they could do best by establishing tools for bug detection and safe code writing. In fact while a government certification and free bug testing is nice it is not what they are supposed to be doing.
Neat, thanks. I did look at some horse photos (unfortunately not so easy to see live horses where I live in Tokyo). The front knees bend like a person's but the back legs are much longer and the knee joint goes the opposite direction. Though I haven't studied horse musculature yet, can't tell what is going on in the upper rear leg i.e. how those big thigh muscles get attached. I wonder if the robot has both knees facing each other for stability, more like matched pogo sticks than a horse maybe. I'd have to check muybridge but the robot seems to have a gait in which two diagonally opposed legs move forward at the same time. Perhaps this is not really the way horses move.. interesting topic, thanks.
That uncanny valley thing has something going for it but what.. this looks like a enemy a la Dr. Who. Actually the movie started out looking like a bad scifi flick! I mean the shapeless, bandlike legs are wrapped in amorphous swaths of black cloth for pete's sake!
I have often imagined it would be nice to have a simple robotic aid walking along beside me to carry a computer bag or suitcase, and imagine wheels or some rotating feet. Maybe a little tank tread, for example in Tokyo they have things on a single tank tread in train stations to lift bales of newspapers over stairs and walk it across the station. But this is another story. The tank treads or something cute and well balanced would evince a "cool!" or "neat!" or "how smart!" reaction. This however evinces revulsion, it looks anemic, sick, taken over by parasites, etc. It looks like it spends most of its time actually bouncing up and down or meaninglessly moving diagonally with no clear idea of the direction it should be going in. Looks like the head is in the rear even though who knows. Anyway a few more generations and it and a few hundred of its friends ought to be able to lug all kinds of explosives up into Osama's cave so you know there's a lot more of this coming. Looks more like a PR thing to scare people.. but technically it's pretty impressive.
So NASA is still operating in non-metric units, they created a laser measuring device which TFA suggests is measured with software outputting non-metric units though we don't know if they use the decimal system or say 1/16 inch, they had to be requested to add SI (systeme internationale, or metric) units, TFA has to explain what SI units are, TFA then uses the ambiguous word English which in measurements usually indicates non-metric, bushel and foot-pound quaintness even beyond the American units. Maybe NASA doesn't feel comfortable with SI and so is trying not to standardize on it or appear to be an expert on it? When's the next bit of space hardware due to get a nervous breakdown due to a need for inches and degrees fahrenheit?
I used to work with a company that made sound synthesis and performance software, Intel provided money because they were constantly looking for apps that required heavy duty processors. You just don't need a 3 GHz processor for Microsoft Office! -- Unless something sneaky like intentional bloating, etc. is going on. Intel knew this probably would't fly, but they undoubtedly gave Skype a pile of money to do it anyway. Intel has in return gotten fabulous PR, that their CPUs are much more powerful than Skypes. Everyone on /. knows it! Intel monopolistic? Not so important to many people, nor so newsworthy. Skype likewise probably thought it had a good chance of being able to get by without a lawsuit against themselves directly, and probably Intel will pay for any legal fees they incur. In the end Intel is feeling the pressure, but good! And this is proof that they have now got to stoop so low as to hire software companies to cripple their software in order to make Intel look good.
But it may not be as bad as all that. Not that I think it is a great idea, but Japan for example is starting domain naming in Japanese characters (hiragana and katakana alphabets, or kanji which are basically Chinese characters). So you need UTF-8 and Japanese font display and input support just to type in the domain name.
Check out this page which says it is ICANN authorized plus it offers .jp domains in kanji ("IDN multilingual domains") side by side with English ones.
I also note that i-dns.net in California supports root domains and they provide soft keyboard java applets to input them. I don't know anybody using them, though a 2000 press release mentions a couple well known companies in Japan, but I can see that the top selection in the dropdown menu (read as "koushi" or public in Japanese, though it is really Chinese which I can't read) is possibly what they will use for ".com" for example the Japanese versions use "kaisha" (company) and "netto" (net) as .com and .net equivalents it seems.
I found a 2002 Internet Draft from JPNIC on this sort of thing. It seems to me the biggest problem is that you have to be able to read a language to access an address written in that language. May be useful for old folks but at present it seems to be quite unpopular in Japan.
Altair obviously is not named after some star in Aquila. It is named after the MITS Altair 8800 which was an instant, overwhelming success and its bus became the de facto standard.. and the 8800 was in turn named after a star in Star Trek and not in Aquila. See the emulator. Though these guys think the 8800 was named after the movie Forbidden Planet, but it could also have been Altair sf magazine, which probably was named after a star in Aquila. Of course Altair also means "the flyer" in Arabic which is better than considering it an ill-starred lover. Though any of the above would provide for great mission logos too. Anyway it is difficult to work out who named what since the 8800 was named after the star Altair that the Starship Enterprise was heading for, but the Space Shuttle Enterprise was obviously named after the Star Trek Starship, or maybe after a balloon, or a seafaring ship, and probably not Branson's suborbital.
They need to get together with the guys who built the quantum computer in the next thread over. That way they can do nothing and see a big decrease in illegal copying.
First is to get the money managed properly. It is stupid to say 1 billion will be spent over ten years. Put it in a fund and spend 100 million or whatever the interest is, every year forever.
Google already has technical, philosophical and business tools that can work.
I have some experience with NGO activities. Mainly spearheaded by a famous journalist and supported on the web by me over maybe 10 years, with many other people accreting around the personality of this journalist. Granted one website I made attracted a quarter million dollars in donations, with nothing but our sweat. But to tell you the truth it was mostly his. That site, and projects of his own for example building in Cambodia their best hospital, a free newspaper, 200 schools, an orphanage, and so on are mainly I think successes due to his extraordinary 1) stubbornness, 2) unstinting generosity, 3) going to where the problem is, and 4) pulling in a lifetime of favors, sponsors, supporters, donors, etc. Maybe #1 is the biggest.
Always I have been limited in what I could offer due to a need to support myself elsewhere, and not going to the problem area myself. Conversely, he didn't always come out of it in one piece, he had a stroke once somewhere you really don't want that to happen.
Anyway, Google needs an army of people like that maybe based of small teams, each for a certain area, and Google is going to have an ops center like the U.S. army in Florida which however is going to be far away from the real problem not even in the same time zone. They need to assemble go-getter teams to identify and solve problems and give them real support.
There are long term Google-like things they can do of course like supporting open source, compiling educational and how-to manuals, printing and distributing that info, etc. But most of the areas are going to need people on the ground with solid support, and a committment to learning what works and multiplying it. Maybe it will be good to spread info through the Internet and hook people in the 3rd world into it, and maybe not. A big problem in many of my own suggestions were that these countries have nothing but a massive amount of pride and a horrible history. Often there is an obvious fix that would require help from the country next door.. like an Internet line, or phone service via an existing satellite. Massive political problems. Maybe the army wants to take over that nice net connection you are bringing in, or maybe radio signals will be bad for your health. (One project in Cambodia used steel shipping containers for schoolrooms since they were impervious to bullets.) Maybe there are no phones. Villages may be too far away from each other for easy communication. There may be deadly diseases and unhealthy water which are the biggest problems (so we have a malaria nets campaign). Maybe jealousies, misunderstandings, criminals will be a problem (I know we had a guard killed once, who was guarding Macintoshes for the newspaper).
I was a coordinator for the Science and Technology in Society Forum in Japan (stsforum.org). According to a guest from Nigeria, before solving with IT the problems were lack of firewood and even bigger, a brain drain to the cities. And there was a major problem in him just getting visa and travel to Japan where the forum was held. We took a poll, who thought such problems would be solved by politicians and who thought by engineers.
Well, both I and a very nice VP from Intel said engineers and everyone else said politicians. I think the real answer is: On the ground people with an engineering, problem solving mindset, with political and technical support. I lean toward the "engineers" choice still but it is clear that we are not talking about armchair geeks (though they have a very important role in executing solutions once specifications are determined), we are talking about Solution Engineers, people who understand technologies (including but not just Internet) and communication. Google funding travel expenses so it is easy for people to get t
Sounds like a nice little business. I live in Tokyo, do you have anything you want me to try and sell?
Just to be wacky I'll post what I look for, I want jobs for an expert with my experience and skillset that specifically want someone to do a certain job, freelance, and it can be done off-site. Jobs for a creative, experienced freelance programmer, requiring good communication and experience, but specifically not requiring a geographical location nearby or even in the U.S. I tried other sites and they didn't work. It seems wierd because I know these jobs exist, and I get them when I spend time selling myself to companies. If I for example have a good deal of experience in a specific area, with products I've made and great clients, then I ought to be able to beat out a college kid, a Chinese programmer, or an Indian outsourcer. Like jobs.perl.org.
I don't know if it's in the U.S. yet but yesterday for the first time, I saw in a Tokyo shop two G-shock watches that have TV/VCR remote controls with infrared transmitters. One was just channel up/down and volume up/down, the other also had standard vcr controls, I mean dedicated buttons on the watch. A big red transmitter at the top. So I guess if you frequent pubs with tv sets etc you can be annoying. Don't know if this has any use as an irda device. Must be programmable..
Thanks! time to tell the wiki..
Here or here, a very nice article on the project, "Margaret Turnbull and Jill Tarter have a new list, called HabCat: A Catalog of Nearby Habitable Stellar Systems." (2003) Interview included.
Interesting that starting with the Hipparcos catalog of 120,000 stars and skipping all with major problems for life ("cataclysmic, eruptive, pulsating, rotating, or X-ray stars", low metal content systems, rotating too fast or too much UV or bad size or composition), left 1 star in 6 still potential life bearers.
Wiki on HabCat and Turnbull. The Turnbull page has a link to a PDF, which is a very interesting scientific paper about how the list of habitable stars was made.
Wiki article on the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which uses Turnbull's list of 5000 candidates within a 100 light year radius. List of Top 100 candidates. Note 18 Scorpii at 46 light years is number 62 in the list, and 37 Geminorum is not listed.
The highest ranked 2 candidates in that list are just 4 ly away from Earth, at Rigil Kentaurus, and then Tau Ceti at 12 ly. There is one at 3 ly and some others at 19, 20, 24 ly too.
Allen Telescope Array
Turnbull's top 10 list includes 51 Pegasus, where in 1995 Swiss astronomers spotted the first planet outside our solar system, a Jupiter-like giant.
Others include 18 Sco in the Scorpio constellation, which is very similar to our own sun; epsilon Indi A, a star one-tenth as bright as the sun; and alpha Centauri B, part of the closest solar system to our own.
The point is that U.S. media companies and the terrorized U.S. have allowed breathtakingly broad rules and now technologies to be put in place, putatively for safety, and the U.S. government and corporations have worked heart to promulgate this around the world.
However, these rules and technologies are in fact so far from what was general thinking in the U.S. say 20 years ago that the Chinese government can now smirkingly say a week or so ago that their censorship and disclosure practices are in line with those of the rest of the world. And the surveillance tools being inserted into consumer items at the behest of the U.S. government and corporations are in fact tools that reduce freedom of everyone and can indeed be used even more effectively and chillingly in nations that started out with less freedom in the first place.
As it happens, timing has worked out so marvelously one might wonder if there is an unseen law of sociology at work. Incidents like the Sony rootkit and Homeland security being sent home by a librarian are coming up at approximately the same time that the most venerable U.S. computer firm sold its computer manufacturing to a Chinese firm and a U.S. congressman and Holocaust survivor is demanding black and white ethics from the Yahoo and Google.
Timing is perfect to wash away the bullshit and leave in razor-etched glory the facts, the players, and the route that must be taken by western civilization.
Don't know who you are, but I have nothing against windows per se. Well actually I do hate the corporate marketing angle that constantly crops up in MS software but that is not my point. I have no proof such as you demand, and do not think Media Player is a rootkit at this point in time. However it does seem that Microsoft will like Sony have to do something with the OS and/or media players to control operations. By the way though it was not a target of my comment, actually Windows has often hidden files from me, but it is a "feature" you know, for newbies presumably. There is a gray line between feature design and self-serving corporate strategy, like there is a gray line between services and rootkits. Though personally I think a rootkit is a tool used to allow its deployer to gain superuser access to your machine. If MS produces someting in the future to disable key functionality of your DVD or cpu this is a rootkit in my book and the specs of these new DVDs seem to require it. (you can read those specs yourself)
Interesting. I will wait with interest to see whether any such legislation can be created that does not also force a ruling against the software embedded in new DVD drives that will let remote attackers brick your hardware. In particular, this will be quite fun if there is a system driver that gets installed (r00tkit!) which enforces the process across all copy operations. I think the definition of rootkit is a slippery sliding thing and you could even say Microsoft supplies them if you didn't know about it when purchasing Windows, or if it gets installed in an automated update (e.g. of Media Player).
Caveat, the author is a friend of mine. Toshio Iwai is a well known digital media artist who has done a number of works in which you compose music in one way or another, often using some kind of objects you can manipulate. Sometimes as simiple as a bouncy bal, other times you are herding a fleet of lights bouncing musically through a matrix like sound fireworks. So some of the things in the game are evolutions of some of his works. For example the donut spinners.. in recent years he has worked with displays projected from above onto a white table or in this case a white turntable.. you spin the turntable with your hand and something like a donut in the game appears. These displays are neat because you can make virtual controls sensed from above or below, giving an interesting non-crt tactile feel. Anyway, I also wanted to save things I made but it seems this may have been an artistic decision.. or possibly a technical limitation. One thing you may like to know is that at the Electroplankton launch in La Foret hall in Harajuku, Tokyo, the president of Nintendo came and gave a talk with Iwai and said the DS was made to a musical and interactive specifications so that it could play Electroplankton. There is also a wikipedia article about it. Incidentally a FAQ at gamefaqs says it is not a game because "Electroplankton has no measurable objective; you can't 'complete', 'finish', 'win' or 'succeed' at playing it." However I got a massive amount of enjoyment out of it and electroplankton is the necessary and sufficient reason I'd have for buying a DS, I think this definition of game and need to fit into even one's idea of what will sell is unneccessary. For example I went to XBOX Live! which is a large bar lounge Microsoft set up in Omotesando, Tokyo (near La Foret) and tried a couple games for the XBOX in particular one where you direct armies to fight each other and you have magical berserker powers. Without instructions I found it initially interesting but so hard to win, so shallow, and so painful on the fingers that after 30 games or so I just gave up and never want to look at the place again. For me anyway Electroplankton beats that "showcase game" hands down.. a different audience perhaps. I'd rather thank Nintendo for doing it and hope it sells enough for them to make more like it! P.S. also it beats hands down the Fly Pen I got my nephews for Christmas, by about 100x. It would be worth it to figure out how to hook up an amp to it and record to a pc.. heck worth buying a DS for them too I think. And better for their brains than yet another Harry Potter adventure though they love those too.
Granted Google Desktop is free (as is enterprise edition for now too, except support is $10K/yr), there is a very funny side to this too. Most people these days have *way* too much memory and CPU, considering the tasks for which they are using their machines. I mean computing, not realtime 3D rendering, sound synthesis or maneuvering bloated app bits around. The computing side of machines. Personal computers these days have enough power these days to run powerful search engines of their own without farming it across the net. I myself am very happy Google is doing this since last year I designed a simple program that has some of the same functionality and now I can point to Google and say "but my system is safer". How long until those neat ethernet equipped hard disks come with similar searching/rsyncing features? Anyway I keep rating everything I see against the BeOS (now Zeta) live search query folders. So far that is the best darned thing I've seen.
Leave your tokens at the office/home and call your coworker/wife. Won't work in an underground data center though, unless you can run fast. I don't think I'd recommend a webcam.
WxPerl makes me happy and seems at this point to provide maximum power for minimum effort, and being sufficiently mature at this point in time. VisualBasic has made me very unhappy whenever I have used it in the past.
WxPerl is Perl bindings to wxwindows which itself is a cross-platform C++ based library that can be used from C, or from Python and Perl (and maybe some others). Depending on what you want to do maybe a lightweight language like Perl could make you very happy too.
If you use VisualBasic you may find it possible to get a simple job done relatively quickly but if it ever turns around, bites your butt and grinds your bones between its molars, don't say I didn't warn you. That said, it is certainly possible that it has gotten better than last time I used it some years ago, but to me it reeks. I am biased though, towards Perl and linux. You can look at the successful projects made with wxwindows at wxwindows.org.