The "writeup" you provide a link to includes a statement from "the person" whose name happens to be Mark Morrissey that "I think that it is fairly obvious from this report that I didn't see any clear indication of a violation of the law. However, if one reads the search warrant (that I didn't see until after it was served), there is a statement attributed to me where I supposedly tell law enforcement that Randal has violated Oregon law. I never made such a statement to law enforcement."
Here is the text of the article you linked to with a couple of the key bits highlighted:
Google manager: Google Apps replaced Microsoft Office at 100,000 businesses
By Stan Beer
Friday, 23 February 2007
Google's newly released online productivity suite Google Apps has already replaced Microsoft Office at more than 100,000 small to medium enterprises and has been deployed at two of the largest companies in the world, according to the search leader's enterprise product boss.
Kevin Gough, product manager, Google Enterprise, told iTWire that prior to its official launch today businesses have already moved off their desktop systems to Google Apps, which includes wordprocessing, spreadsheet, calendaring, email and instant messaging capabilities. Gough also said that a number of large enterprises have also commenced deployment and pilots of the online system that is looming as a threat to Microsoft's desktop-based office productivity dominance.
"We have hundreds of thousands of small to medium businesses that have already done that," said Gough. "They've already switched their entire infrastructure over to Google Apps. We have just released the Premier Edition of Google Apps today and today we already have GE, Procter & Gamble, Prudential and Loreal. If on the first day of the launch we have two of the top 25 companies in the world. Imagine what's going to happen in a month or a year from now."
According to Gough, expensive desktop-based office productivity tools are now being viewed as unnecessary non-core infrastructure for enterprises.
"There is a core versus context argument," says Gough. "CIOs are increasingly looking at what can they safely outsource to a trusted partner and what is a core function that is going to give them a competitive differentiator. They're realizing that email and productivity tools and the staff that have to maintain that is not a competitive differentiator for them and they can redeploy that staff on things that are more core to their business. These large companies have proven that they're confident with Google and that email and productivity is something that they're comfortable outsourcing."
Gough believes that desktop office tools are anachronism from a different age when people worked in a different environment to the present.
"Prior tools for productivity were really designed for a different way of doing business where it was type of a serial kind of collaboration," says Gough. "The Internet, people working from home, telecommuting and going on vacation changed how people needed to interact with their applications. Also the ability to share content rapidly with teams that form and disband as rapidly is the key in a killer productivity tool."
"Really what we did was pick that the email inbox is the hub of a productivity tool and with Google Apps that's what we've focussed on optimising.
"Things that you can do from the inbox are different - things like in-browser instant messaging to quickly contact a colleague without having to pick up the phone or wait for an email.
"Another thing is tight integration with our calendaring solution. If I were to send you an email asking if you wanted meet up for a coffee tomorrow at 4PM, the technology is smart enough to realize that is a meeting request and would prompt me to add it to my Google Calendar and share it with you.
"The ability to have that kind of central hub for all your information with search in the center is the key. Search really is the key because when project teams form and disband you don't want to lose the knowledge and intellectual property they've created. The best way to access that is the search interface because everyone knows how to search."
According to Gough, users don't necessarily have to replace to their existing office systems. However, he says that many workers are being under serviced because of the cost of desktop solutions.
My impression of Photoshop is that it has been a general purpose product aimed at the mass market (meaning everyone from your grandma who just wants to get rid of some red-eye to people who want to put horns and a beard on photos of George W. Bush). Professional photographers apparently have been using different software targeted directly at them or businesses that serve pro photogs. As the Ars article states, "Professional digital photography has been a reality for a while now but the big-name developers have been slow to catch up."
Wikipedia has a good definition of market segmentation as "the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. Because each segment is fairly homogeneous in their needs and attitudes, they are likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy. That is, they are likely to have similar feelings and ideas about a marketing mix comprised of a given product or service, sold at a given price, distributed in a certain way, and promoted in a certain way." So your home Photoshopper and sports photographers are two different sets of potential customers, and what they are willing to pay for/expect out of software are two entirely different things.
My point is that Adobe and others have realized that "professional digital photography" has become a significant market, and therefore it makes financial sense to come up with products specifically targeted to this group of people whose needs and expectations regarding photo processing software are much higher than the mass of casual photographers (and are willing to pay a much higher price for a software package if it meets their expectations).
For example, take the work of Georg Cantor, creator of set theory. Per Wikipedia's entry on Cantor,
"Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are "more numerous" than the natural numbers. In fact, Cantor's theorem implies the existence of an "infinity of infinities." He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers, and their arithmetic. Cantor's work is of great philosophical interest, a fact of which he was well aware.
Cantor's work encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré, and later from Hermann Weyl and L.E.J. Brouwer. Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. His recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life were once blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries, but these bouts can now be seen as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder.
Today, the vast majority of mathematicians who are neither constructivists nor finitists accept Cantor's work on transfinite sets and arithmetic, recognizing it as a major paradigm shift. In the words of David Hilbert: "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created."
I added the bold highlights to the Wikipedia quote. In case you doubt Wikipedia, my copy of Van Nostrand Reinhold's Encyclopedia of Mathematics says substantially the same thing. Cantor's work is one of the primary foundations of modern computer science.
Re:Hmmn, implied refrigeration
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 1
I don't disagree with your point that water is an ongoing issue; and I think that this new "windmill" style technology is very exciting and has a good chance of being able to be put into place without costing too much. I was just pointing out that there is always going to be variability in the water supply. Some years there will be plenty to go around, and unfortunately currently Australia is very short on water. The key is to make sure that either allocation of water is based on the short years so that when droughts do come around there won't be as much of a political crisis, or that you have some kind of system to make up the shortfall.
Re:Hmmn, implied refrigeration
on
Water From Wind
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· Score: 1
and conversely, high pressure heats and induces evaporation. The statement from the article that "but there's almost as much invisible moisture in the air above the Sahara or the Nullarbor as there is in the steamy tropics" is correct due to the existence of persistent high pressure over those areas. So I am optimistic that this technology might actually turn into a viable product.
The other water production scheme mentioned in the article proposing to "channel seawater to inland communities...a brilliant system of solar distillation and desalination would produce fresh water en route" doesn't make economic sense because the cost of digging the canals which the author acknowledges would require "large-scale investment" would drive the price per liter of the generated water far above the cost of existing water sources.
Unfortunately, the article has a fairly glaring howler near the beginning where he talks about "ending our ancient dependence on rain, that increasingly unreliable source." Where is the basis for the idea that rainfall is becoming increasingly unreliable? Granted, parts of Australia are suffering from drought, but droughts and floods come and go in varying sizes and in varying timescales from tens of years to tens of thousands of years.
A couple of people recently have alleged that South Korea is being pushed around by Microsoft. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds.
"This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online," wrote South Korean blogger Gen Kanai. Commentators on technology news site Slashdot have also tsk-tsk-ed the situation.
The pending release of Vista has prompted many to speculate that it could increase security risks.
To some, this looks like the ugly face of monopolism and bad decisions by government leaders and large corporations. But there is actually a much simpler reason why people in South Korea have so much Microsoft software.
They steal it.
Piracy is rampant in the nation. During my visit to the country two and a half years ago, one of the most entertaining topics was how businesses dodged police raids for pirated software. They sounded like tales from Prohibition. Do people want to steal software? No, but they worry about costs and staying competitive, and right now many believe the risk of piracy is worth it.
In the city Incheon, near Seoul, police investigators who were empowered to audit software on PCs snuck in through an office building's back exit, according to a source who worked for an Internet service provider inside the facility at the time. A receptionist immediately began to call all the businesses in the building.
"Everyone closed their doors," the former ISP employee said at the time. The ISP wasn't so lucky. Its employees didn't get out in time, and the company had to pay $42,000 (50 million won) in software licenses and fines.
At another building, someone held the door closed while other people shoved laptops out the window, I was told. Two other people I spoke to--the president and the chief technology officer of a growing company--went out for lunch one day, but then had to hide in the next-door parking lot for two hours until a surprise raid ended at their building.
People laughed when they told me these stories, and not just because it was 2 a.m. One of the more popular methods of avoid ing the law apparently is to befriend someone in the government who can divulge the timing of a pending raid. A companywide holiday is then declared.
Do people want to steal software? No, but they worry about costs and staying competitive, and right now many believe the risk of piracy is worth it. Intellectual property rights are also a little tough to enforce sometimes. In Seoul, there is a Samsung Wedding Chapel, but it's not owned by the Samsung Electronics conglomerate. The country sometimes feels like the wild west with big-screen TVs.
"They just close the door, because they know it is the fastest way to get away," said a Microsoft representative at the time.
The government and Microsoft work together closely because piracy creates trade headaches for South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication. The country depends on exports, and the last thing its government and business leaders want is to have to deal with questions that put them on the defensive. Piracy also hurts the local software market..."
This material needn't necessarily be limited to use for gadgets. Using this to coat the surfaces of cars, bicycles, or motorcycles seems like a worthwhile application. Then paint scratching and rust could be virtually eliminated. Adding an extra 50,000 miles to the life of a car would probably justify the added material cost.
Someone please mod parent up. This is absolutely correct. If you want an insider's perspective on how the Pentagon's budget decisions for big-ticket hardware works read "Skunk Works" by the late Ben Rich. Rich was the guy who ran Lockheed's Skunk Works when they developed the F-117.
I think that a major (if, obvious) difference between Disney in 1999 and Disney today is that Bob Iger is in charge instead of Michael Eisner. To me it is clear that Iger recognizes that there is huge demand for "family-friendly" entertainment product and is directing Disney's resource allocations accordingly. In my opinion, Eisner was more hooked in to the "let the talent produce what they want regardless of whether it is what the market wants" mentality. This fall the animated picture about penguins was ahead at the box office over the Bond flick every single week, and both films opened at the same time.
Perhaps Disney might be more receptive to your idea now that there's been a change in management:).
Mission statement: Use Earth-based observations of the dark portion of the moon to establish the rates and sizes of large meteoroids (greater than 500 grams or 1 pound in mass) striking the lunar surface.
Why it is important: The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) eventually calls for extended astronaut stays on the lunar surface. Spacecraft, vehicles, habitats, and EVA suits must all be designed to withstand the stresses posed by the harsh lunar environment over this period of time. Meteoroids, and the ejecta produced when they create impact craters, are part of this environment. "
Essentially NASA has an Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory that continuously is watching the Moon.
Then they: "attach an ASTROVID StellaCam EX camera to each of our telescopes, and route the camera output into a Sony tape deck, which converts the video signal into a digital format that is stored on a hard disk. After an observing session, we look for flashes in the data. Our first impact was found by someone simply looking through a couple of hours of video. This can be quite tedious, however, and tired humans can easily miss a short impact flash, so custom computer software was developed to look for the flashes. If one is found, additional software is then used to extract detailed information on the flash -- its brightness as a function of time (light curve), where it was seen on the moon, if it was due to a meteor shower, and so forth. Using this information, we can estimate the mass or size of the meteoroid."
This seems to indicate that they've already got the system working.
I would mod you up if I could:)...I'm posting the text from your link.
Terra Soft to Build World's First Cell-Based Supercomputer
Tomorrow, Terra Soft will officially announce the construction of the world's first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.
In the fall of '05, Terra Soft was contacted by Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. (SCEI) to develop and manage a supercomputing cluster built upon the IBM Cell Broadband Engine and the Linux OS. This spring, Terra Soft was contracted by Sony and in August completed the construction of a 3000 sq-ft supercomputing facility capable of housing 2400 1U systems. In this remodeled extension to the Loveland, Colorado headquarters, Terra Soft will construct a test cluster and a substantially larger production cluster, dubbed "E.coli" and "Amoeba" respectively.
Terra Soft will use the test cluster "E.coli" to conduct advanced software development, optimization, and testing with emphasis on Y-HPC and Y-Bio applied to the Cell Broadband Engine. The production cluster "Amoeba" will be made available to select University and Department of Energy laboratories to further life sciences research.
The clusters will incorporate, in part, Cell-based PS3 systems. The Cell Broadband Engine provides a "1 + 8" multi-core processing environment, enabling optimized code to function at a superior level of performance over traditional single or dual core CPUs. With all 8 cores on a single chip, the code processes do not lose performance by dropping down to the memory bus as with historic, multiple CPU configurations.
Glen Otero, Director of Life Sciences Research for Terra Soft Solutions explains, "This cluster represents a two-fold opportunity: to optimize a suite of open-source life science applications for the Cell processor; to develop a hands-on community around this world-first cluster whereby researchers and life science studies at all levels may benefit. Once up and running with our first labs engaged, we will expand the community through invitations and referrals, supporting a growing knowledge base and library of Cell optimized code, open and available to life science researchers everywhere."
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is working with Terra Soft to optimize a suite of life science applications. Los Alamos and Oak Ridge National Labs are also engaged, with select universities coming on-board early in 2007. Terra Soft is working to optimize the entire Y-Bio bioinformatics suite.
Thomas Swidler, Sr. Director of Research & Development at SCEI states, "This cluster is for Sony a means of demonstrating the diversity of the PS3, taking it well beyond the traditional role of a game box. While we are not in the business of competing for the Top500.org nor building cluster components, this creative use of the PS3 beta systems enables Sony to support a level of real world research that may produce very positive, beneficial results."
Regarding Terra Soft's contribution to the project, Swidler continued, "In working with Terra Soft, we found a single source for the operating system, cluster construction tools, and bioinformatics software suite. Again, their dedication to detail and professional results has surpassed our expectations. We are very eager for the completion of this initial phase in order that the research may begin."
Both clusters will run the new Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 operating system; a beta version of Y-HPC v2.0, the first commercial, cross-architecture Linux cluster construction suite; the Moab cluster management suite by Cluster Resources; and Y-Bio v1.1, a suite of gene sequence analysis tools soon to be optimized for the Cell processor.
Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft offers, "Working to complete the cluster facility has been the highlight of my time in this industry, a truly gratifying experience. What we have accomplished this spring and summer showcases the peak of our design, coordination, and engineering effort... from facility design and construction in Jul
Mantell's comments seemed thoughtful and reasonable to me. It seems to me that it would be nice to be in a position where you could quit your job, take a year off, and then get your old job back.
I have had good results doing exactly what you suggest for my personal email. I find that Gmail does keep 99.5% of the junk out of my Mozilla Thunderbird inbox. My work email, on the other hand, comes directly from an ISP and they seem to be failing at identifying some of the recent spam iterations like penny stock touts.
from the article: "our first formal event, the morning after the introductory supper, was a tour of the Microsoft Home of the Future -- under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)." The concept makes my brain hurt; a marketing event where the invitees can't reveal what they've seen. That is real ineptitude.
I think you are on the right track here, at least for products that don't cost a lot. A lot of folks are probably hesitant to take a defective/unwanted product back to the store when the packaging is destroyed because they think the store will refuse to take it back and don't want to deal with the hassle of arguing with store management and would never think to dig up state law on returns policies.
On the other hand, the way packaging has changed has probably made life somewhat more difficult for shoplifters. You can't just pull the item out of its packaging and if caught claim you were brining it back as a return. When I'm opening the packaging on toys I've bought for my kids there are usually three or four of the wire twisty thingies that take a while to unwind and pull out. If you try slitting the plastic, untwisting all the wires and pulling them out, that's going to be obvious to other shoppers and store security in a real hurry.
With respect to your comment on form marks, the Times story specifically states that the blocks in question had "diverse shapes" which to me would represent form marks. Since the forms were likely not made from kiln-dried lumber or steel there would have been some warping resulting in inconsistent shaping of the blocks. Also, tools used to put the forms in place would have left some marks resulting in shape inconsistencies.
Another criticism of this theory in the article is stated as "a huge amount of limestone chalk and burnt wood would have been needed to make the concrete." Egypt was one of the premier civilizations in the world at the time of the pyramid's construction. I doubt that obtaining these materials would have been a problem for the builders.
"How much damage to civilization the Romans actualy did." I am rather perplexed by this statement. A list of contributions to civilization made by Rome could include: -world class civil engineering: there are many structures built by Roman engineers still standing and a number are still in use -the concept of republican government (and I mean in the sense of a body of legislators elected by citizens empowered to conduct community business; not the US political party) -extensive body of literature and philosophy which forms much of the foundation of Western civilization today and is still relevant -preserved Greek literature, structures, and philosophy and incorporated same into Roman culture -demonstrated that a large political body composed of many regions incorporating a variety of cultures and races could be established and be stable and peaceful I am not saying that Rome was perfect and obviously its society eventually became corrupt and thus vulnerable to destruction, but it is absurd to talk about Roman damage to civilization.
What, precisely, is a doddle? As a Yank that's a term I've never seen before. Seriously, though, I think that your analysis of the integration problems that the OS community has are right on.
This is not such a bad idea; when the paranoids and UFO watchers check satellite shots of Area 51 they'll see the KFC ad, and notice they're hungry. Actually, Area 51 is probably near the top of the list of places people plug into Google Earth, so a lot of people are likely to see this.
I lived in Japan for two years and earned a minor in the language at a major private university in the US. Toward the end of my time in Japan, my skill with the language was sufficient that when I spoke to native Japanese on the phone, frequently they thought I was actually Japanese rather than a foreigner. I seriously considered working for the US government as a way of exploiting my Japanese skills, but I concluded that spending my days translating the kind of documents that the US government would be interested in would be incredibly, horrifically boring.
This is one story where Slashdot editors got the title right. The FAS report is nothing more than a request for government funding. There are some good points in the report but one blinding flash of the obvious that caught my eye was this conclusion: "There are differences between games for education and games for entertainment." Whoa, knock me over with a feather:)..
The report also states that "Poor markets, the exploratory nature of research on educational games, and uncertain returns on developing generic tools inhibit private sector investment." Private sector investment in educational games may be small relative to the amount of money being poured into console games, but there are plenty of educational games out there. I have been impressed by games produced by the Living Books division of Broderbund.
The closing statement from the flaming article: "Amos agrees that MAYA-II could help researchers.....But he warns that the DNA molecules used cannot be controlled perfectly, and could be prone to the occasional malfunction."
So this is different from Microsoft Windows in what way?
The very first sentence of this article is absurd and flatly wrong. "The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe." Not true! Sure, the story fits all the "known" data; but I think it is fair to say that our inventory is still incomplete.
Don't you remember? When Indiana Jones brought back the Ark of the Covenant, the government put it in a plain wooden box and stashed it a giant warehouse. And they didn't even have bar codes for labeling things back then. Come on!
Slashdot Mirror
The "writeup" you provide a link to includes a statement from "the person" whose name happens to be Mark Morrissey that "I think that it is fairly obvious from this report that I didn't see any clear indication of a violation of the law. However, if one reads the search warrant (that I didn't see until after it was served), there is a statement attributed to me where I supposedly tell law enforcement that Randal has violated Oregon law. I never made such a statement to law enforcement."
Google manager: Google Apps replaced Microsoft Office at 100,000 businesses
By Stan Beer
Friday, 23 February 2007
Google's newly released online productivity suite Google Apps has already replaced Microsoft Office at more than 100,000 small to medium enterprises and has been deployed at two of the largest companies in the world, according to the search leader's enterprise product boss.
Kevin Gough, product manager, Google Enterprise, told iTWire that prior to its official launch today businesses have already moved off their desktop systems to Google Apps, which includes wordprocessing, spreadsheet, calendaring, email and instant messaging capabilities. Gough also said that a number of large enterprises have also commenced deployment and pilots of the online system that is looming as a threat to Microsoft's desktop-based office productivity dominance.
"We have hundreds of thousands of small to medium businesses that have already done that," said Gough. "They've already switched their entire infrastructure over to Google Apps. We have just released the Premier Edition of Google Apps today and today we already have GE, Procter & Gamble, Prudential and Loreal. If on the first day of the launch we have two of the top 25 companies in the world. Imagine what's going to happen in a month or a year from now."
According to Gough, expensive desktop-based office productivity tools are now being viewed as unnecessary non-core infrastructure for enterprises.
"There is a core versus context argument," says Gough. "CIOs are increasingly looking at what can they safely outsource to a trusted partner and what is a core function that is going to give them a competitive differentiator. They're realizing that email and productivity tools and the staff that have to maintain that is not a competitive differentiator for them and they can redeploy that staff on things that are more core to their business. These large companies have proven that they're confident with Google and that email and productivity is something that they're comfortable outsourcing."
Gough believes that desktop office tools are anachronism from a different age when people worked in a different environment to the present.
"Prior tools for productivity were really designed for a different way of doing business where it was type of a serial kind of collaboration," says Gough. "The Internet, people working from home, telecommuting and going on vacation changed how people needed to interact with their applications. Also the ability to share content rapidly with teams that form and disband as rapidly is the key in a killer productivity tool."
"Really what we did was pick that the email inbox is the hub of a productivity tool and with Google Apps that's what we've focussed on optimising.
"Things that you can do from the inbox are different - things like in-browser instant messaging to quickly contact a colleague without having to pick up the phone or wait for an email.
"Another thing is tight integration with our calendaring solution. If I were to send you an email asking if you wanted meet up for a coffee tomorrow at 4PM, the technology is smart enough to realize that is a meeting request and would prompt me to add it to my Google Calendar and share it with you.
"The ability to have that kind of central hub for all your information with search in the center is the key. Search really is the key because when project teams form and disband you don't want to lose the knowledge and intellectual property they've created. The best way to access that is the search interface because everyone knows how to search."
According to Gough, users don't necessarily have to replace to their existing office systems. However, he says that many workers are being under serviced because of the cost of desktop solutions.
"We're not saying get rid of your exi
My impression of Photoshop is that it has been a general purpose product aimed at the mass market (meaning everyone from your grandma who just wants to get rid of some red-eye to people who want to put horns and a beard on photos of George W. Bush). Professional photographers apparently have been using different software targeted directly at them or businesses that serve pro photogs. As the Ars article states, "Professional digital photography has been a reality for a while now but the big-name developers have been slow to catch up."
Wikipedia has a good definition of market segmentation as "the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. Because each segment is fairly homogeneous in their needs and attitudes, they are likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy. That is, they are likely to have similar feelings and ideas about a marketing mix comprised of a given product or service, sold at a given price, distributed in a certain way, and promoted in a certain way." So your home Photoshopper and sports photographers are two different sets of potential customers, and what they are willing to pay for/expect out of software are two entirely different things.
My point is that Adobe and others have realized that "professional digital photography" has become a significant market, and therefore it makes financial sense to come up with products specifically targeted to this group of people whose needs and expectations regarding photo processing software are much higher than the mass of casual photographers (and are willing to pay a much higher price for a software package if it meets their expectations).
"Cantor established the importance of one-to-one correspondence between sets, defined infinite and well-ordered sets, and proved that the real numbers are "more numerous" than the natural numbers. In fact, Cantor's theorem implies the existence of an "infinity of infinities." He defined the cardinal and ordinal numbers, and their arithmetic. Cantor's work is of great philosophical interest, a fact of which he was well aware. Cantor's work encountered resistance from mathematical contemporaries such as Leopold Kronecker and Henri Poincaré, and later from Hermann Weyl and L.E.J. Brouwer. Ludwig Wittgenstein raised philosophical objections. His recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life were once blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries, but these bouts can now be seen as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder. Today, the vast majority of mathematicians who are neither constructivists nor finitists accept Cantor's work on transfinite sets and arithmetic, recognizing it as a major paradigm shift. In the words of David Hilbert: "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created."
I added the bold highlights to the Wikipedia quote. In case you doubt Wikipedia, my copy of Van Nostrand Reinhold's Encyclopedia of Mathematics says substantially the same thing. Cantor's work is one of the primary foundations of modern computer science.I don't disagree with your point that water is an ongoing issue; and I think that this new "windmill" style technology is very exciting and has a good chance of being able to be put into place without costing too much. I was just pointing out that there is always going to be variability in the water supply. Some years there will be plenty to go around, and unfortunately currently Australia is very short on water. The key is to make sure that either allocation of water is based on the short years so that when droughts do come around there won't be as much of a political crisis, or that you have some kind of system to make up the shortfall.
and conversely, high pressure heats and induces evaporation. The statement from the article that "but there's almost as much invisible moisture in the air above the Sahara or the Nullarbor as there is in the steamy tropics" is correct due to the existence of persistent high pressure over those areas. So I am optimistic that this technology might actually turn into a viable product.
The other water production scheme mentioned in the article proposing to "channel seawater to inland communities...a brilliant system of solar distillation and desalination would produce fresh water en route" doesn't make economic sense because the cost of digging the canals which the author acknowledges would require "large-scale investment" would drive the price per liter of the generated water far above the cost of existing water sources.
Unfortunately, the article has a fairly glaring howler near the beginning where he talks about "ending our ancient dependence on rain, that increasingly unreliable source." Where is the basis for the idea that rainfall is becoming increasingly unreliable? Granted, parts of Australia are suffering from drought, but droughts and floods come and go in varying sizes and in varying timescales from tens of years to tens of thousands of years.
Here is part of the text of a story posted on CNET today:
By Michael Kanellos
About South Korea's 'dependency' on Microsoft
Story last modified Mon Jan 29 07:28:02 PST 2007
A couple of people recently have alleged that South Korea is being pushed around by Microsoft. It's not nearly as bad as it sounds.
"This nation is also a unique monoculture where 99.9% of all the computer users are on Microsoft Windows. This nation is a place where Apple Macintosh users cannot bank online, make any purchases online, or interact with any of the nation's e-government sites online," wrote South Korean blogger Gen Kanai. Commentators on technology news site Slashdot have also tsk-tsk-ed the situation.
The pending release of Vista has prompted many to speculate that it could increase security risks.
To some, this looks like the ugly face of monopolism and bad decisions by government leaders and large corporations. But there is actually a much simpler reason why people in South Korea have so much Microsoft software.
They steal it.
Piracy is rampant in the nation. During my visit to the country two and a half years ago, one of the most entertaining topics was how businesses dodged police raids for pirated software. They sounded like tales from Prohibition.
Do people want to steal software? No, but they worry about costs and staying competitive, and right now many believe the risk of piracy is worth it.
In the city Incheon, near Seoul, police investigators who were empowered to audit software on PCs snuck in through an office building's back exit, according to a source who worked for an Internet service provider inside the facility at the time. A receptionist immediately began to call all the businesses in the building.
"Everyone closed their doors," the former ISP employee said at the time. The ISP wasn't so lucky. Its employees didn't get out in time, and the company had to pay $42,000 (50 million won) in software licenses and fines.
At another building, someone held the door closed while other people shoved laptops out the window, I was told. Two other people I spoke to--the president and the chief technology officer of a growing company--went out for lunch one day, but then had to hide in the next-door parking lot for two hours until a surprise raid ended at their building.
People laughed when they told me these stories, and not just because it was 2 a.m. One of the more popular methods of avoid ing the law apparently is to befriend someone in the government who can divulge the timing of a pending raid. A companywide holiday is then declared.
Do people want to steal software? No, but they worry about costs and staying competitive, and right now many believe the risk of piracy is worth it. Intellectual property rights are also a little tough to enforce sometimes. In Seoul, there is a Samsung Wedding Chapel, but it's not owned by the Samsung Electronics conglomerate. The country sometimes feels like the wild west with big-screen TVs.
"They just close the door, because they know it is the fastest way to get away," said a Microsoft representative at the time.
The government and Microsoft work together closely because piracy creates trade headaches for South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication. The country depends on exports, and the last thing its government and business leaders want is to have to deal with questions that put them on the defensive. Piracy also hurts the local software market..."
This material needn't necessarily be limited to use for gadgets. Using this to coat the surfaces of cars, bicycles, or motorcycles seems like a worthwhile application. Then paint scratching and rust could be virtually eliminated. Adding an extra 50,000 miles to the life of a car would probably justify the added material cost.
Someone please mod parent up. This is absolutely correct. If you want an insider's perspective on how the Pentagon's budget decisions for big-ticket hardware works read "Skunk Works" by the late Ben Rich. Rich was the guy who ran Lockheed's Skunk Works when they developed the F-117.
I think that a major (if, obvious) difference between Disney in 1999 and Disney today is that Bob Iger is in charge instead of Michael Eisner. To me it is clear that Iger recognizes that there is huge demand for "family-friendly" entertainment product and is directing Disney's resource allocations accordingly. In my opinion, Eisner was more hooked in to the "let the talent produce what they want regardless of whether it is what the market wants" mentality. This fall the animated picture about penguins was ahead at the box office over the Bond flick every single week, and both films opened at the same time.
:).
Perhaps Disney might be more receptive to your idea now that there's been a change in management
Go to this link.
The header blurb is as follows:
LUNAR IMPACTS
Mission statement: Use Earth-based observations of the dark portion of the moon to establish the rates and sizes of large meteoroids (greater than 500 grams or 1 pound in mass) striking the lunar surface.
Why it is important: The Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) eventually calls for extended astronaut stays on the lunar surface. Spacecraft, vehicles, habitats, and EVA suits must all be designed to withstand the stresses posed by the harsh lunar environment over this period of time. Meteoroids, and the ejecta produced when they create impact craters, are part of this environment. "
Essentially NASA has an Automated Lunar and Meteor Observatory that continuously is watching the Moon.
Then they: "attach an ASTROVID StellaCam EX camera to each of our telescopes, and route the camera output into a Sony tape deck, which converts the video signal into a digital format that is stored on a hard disk. After an observing session, we look for flashes in the data. Our first impact was found by someone simply looking through a couple of hours of video. This can be quite tedious, however, and tired humans can easily miss a short impact flash, so custom computer software was developed to look for the flashes. If one is found, additional software is then used to extract detailed information on the flash -- its brightness as a function of time (light curve), where it was seen on the moon, if it was due to a meteor shower, and so forth. Using this information, we can estimate the mass or size of the meteoroid."
This seems to indicate that they've already got the system working.
I would mod you up if I could :)...I'm posting the text from your link.
... from facility design and construction in Jul
Terra Soft to Build World's First Cell-Based Supercomputer
Tomorrow, Terra Soft will officially announce the construction of the world's first Cell-based supercomputing cluster.
In the fall of '05, Terra Soft was contacted by Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. (SCEI) to develop and manage a supercomputing cluster built upon the IBM Cell Broadband Engine and the Linux OS. This spring, Terra Soft was contracted by Sony and in August completed the construction of a 3000 sq-ft supercomputing facility capable of housing 2400 1U systems. In this remodeled extension to the Loveland, Colorado headquarters, Terra Soft will construct a test cluster and a substantially larger production cluster, dubbed "E.coli" and "Amoeba" respectively.
Terra Soft will use the test cluster "E.coli" to conduct advanced software development, optimization, and testing with emphasis on Y-HPC and Y-Bio applied to the Cell Broadband Engine. The production cluster "Amoeba" will be made available to select University and Department of Energy laboratories to further life sciences research.
The clusters will incorporate, in part, Cell-based PS3 systems. The Cell Broadband Engine provides a "1 + 8" multi-core processing environment, enabling optimized code to function at a superior level of performance over traditional single or dual core CPUs. With all 8 cores on a single chip, the code processes do not lose performance by dropping down to the memory bus as with historic, multiple CPU configurations.
Glen Otero, Director of Life Sciences Research for Terra Soft Solutions explains, "This cluster represents a two-fold opportunity: to optimize a suite of open-source life science applications for the Cell processor; to develop a hands-on community around this world-first cluster whereby researchers and life science studies at all levels may benefit. Once up and running with our first labs engaged, we will expand the community through invitations and referrals, supporting a growing knowledge base and library of Cell optimized code, open and available to life science researchers everywhere."
Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is working with Terra Soft to optimize a suite of life science applications. Los Alamos and Oak Ridge National Labs are also engaged, with select universities coming on-board early in 2007. Terra Soft is working to optimize the entire Y-Bio bioinformatics suite.
Thomas Swidler, Sr. Director of Research & Development at SCEI states, "This cluster is for Sony a means of demonstrating the diversity of the PS3, taking it well beyond the traditional role of a game box. While we are not in the business of competing for the Top500.org nor building cluster components, this creative use of the PS3 beta systems enables Sony to support a level of real world research that may produce very positive, beneficial results."
Regarding Terra Soft's contribution to the project, Swidler continued, "In working with Terra Soft, we found a single source for the operating system, cluster construction tools, and bioinformatics software suite. Again, their dedication to detail and professional results has surpassed our expectations. We are very eager for the completion of this initial phase in order that the research may begin."
Both clusters will run the new Yellow Dog Linux v5.0 operating system; a beta version of Y-HPC v2.0, the first commercial, cross-architecture Linux cluster construction suite; the Moab cluster management suite by Cluster Resources; and Y-Bio v1.1, a suite of gene sequence analysis tools soon to be optimized for the Cell processor.
Kai Staats, CEO of Terra Soft offers, "Working to complete the cluster facility has been the highlight of my time in this industry, a truly gratifying experience. What we have accomplished this spring and summer showcases the peak of our design, coordination, and engineering effort
Mantell's comments seemed thoughtful and reasonable to me. It seems to me that it would be nice to be in a position where you could quit your job, take a year off, and then get your old job back.
I have had good results doing exactly what you suggest for my personal email. I find that Gmail does keep 99.5% of the junk out of my Mozilla Thunderbird inbox. My work email, on the other hand, comes directly from an ISP and they seem to be failing at identifying some of the recent spam iterations like penny stock touts.
from the article: "our first formal event, the morning after the introductory supper, was a tour of the Microsoft Home of the Future -- under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA)." The concept makes my brain hurt;
a marketing event where the invitees can't reveal what they've seen. That is real ineptitude.
I think you are on the right track here, at least for products that don't cost a lot. A lot of folks are probably hesitant to take a defective/unwanted product back to the store when the packaging is destroyed because they think the store will refuse to take it back and don't want to deal with the hassle of arguing with store management and would never think to dig up state law on returns policies.
On the other hand, the way packaging has changed has probably made life somewhat more difficult for shoplifters. You can't just pull the item out of its packaging and if caught claim you were brining it back as a return. When I'm opening the packaging on toys I've bought for my kids there are usually three or four of the wire twisty thingies that take a while to unwind and pull out. If you try slitting the plastic, untwisting all the wires and pulling them out, that's going to be obvious to other shoppers and store security in a real hurry.
With respect to your comment on form marks, the Times story specifically states that the blocks in question had "diverse shapes" which to me would represent form marks. Since the forms were likely not made from kiln-dried lumber or steel there would have been some warping resulting in inconsistent shaping of the blocks. Also, tools used to put the forms in place would have left some marks resulting in shape inconsistencies.
Another criticism of this theory in the article is stated as "a huge amount of limestone chalk and burnt wood would have been needed to make the concrete." Egypt was one of the premier civilizations in the world at the time of the pyramid's construction. I doubt that obtaining these materials would have been a problem for the builders.
"How much damage to civilization the Romans actualy did." I am rather perplexed by this statement. A list of contributions to civilization made by Rome could include:
-world class civil engineering: there are many structures built by Roman engineers still standing and a number are still in use
-the concept of republican government (and I mean in the sense of a body of legislators elected by citizens empowered to conduct community business; not the US political party)
-extensive body of literature and philosophy which forms much of the foundation of Western civilization today and is still relevant
-preserved Greek literature, structures, and philosophy and incorporated same into Roman culture
-demonstrated that a large political body composed of many regions incorporating a variety of cultures and races could be established and be stable and peaceful
I am not saying that Rome was perfect and obviously its society eventually became corrupt and thus vulnerable to destruction, but it is absurd to talk about Roman damage to civilization.
What, precisely, is a doddle? As a Yank that's a term I've never seen before. Seriously, though, I think that your analysis of the integration problems that the OS community has are right on.
This is not such a bad idea; when the paranoids and UFO watchers check satellite shots of Area 51 they'll see the KFC ad, and notice they're hungry. Actually, Area 51 is probably near the top of the list of places people plug into Google Earth, so a lot of people are likely to see this.
I lived in Japan for two years and earned a minor in the language at a major private university in the US. Toward the end of my time in Japan, my skill with the language was sufficient that when I spoke to native Japanese on the phone, frequently they thought I was actually Japanese rather than a foreigner. I seriously considered working for the US government as a way of exploiting my Japanese skills, but I concluded that spending my days translating the kind of documents that the US government would be interested in would be incredibly, horrifically boring.
This is one story where Slashdot editors got the title right. The FAS report is nothing more than a request for government funding. There are some good points in the report but one blinding flash of the obvious that caught my eye was this conclusion: "There are differences between games for education and games for entertainment." Whoa, knock me over with a feather:)..
The report also states that "Poor markets, the exploratory nature of research on educational games, and uncertain returns on developing generic tools inhibit private sector investment." Private sector investment in educational games may be small relative to the amount of money being poured into console games, but there are plenty of educational games out there. I have been impressed by games produced by the Living Books division of Broderbund.
The closing statement from the flaming article: "Amos agrees that MAYA-II could help researchers.....But he warns that the DNA molecules used cannot be controlled perfectly, and could be prone to the occasional malfunction."
So this is different from Microsoft Windows in what way?
The very first sentence of this article is absurd and flatly wrong. "The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe." Not true! Sure, the story fits all the "known" data; but I think it is fair to say that our inventory is still incomplete.
Don't you remember? When Indiana Jones brought back the Ark of the Covenant, the government put it in a plain wooden box and stashed it a giant warehouse. And they didn't even have bar codes for labeling things back then. Come on!