Faster Update Cycles in Antarctica
on
Antarctic Telescope?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
It's not just that newer terrestrial technology can beat older orbital technology. It's that any time you update terrestrial technology, you can go update the thing, whereas the Hubble and its successors only get a major refresh every decade or so. So maybe a new Hubble replacement could be better than a new Antarctic telescope, but five years from now, the ground-based system will have 10 times as much computer horsepower just from normal Moore's law effects, plus it'll be able to take advantage of new optical developments, and if you need to replace the Antarctic scope, you can park the new one next door to the old one, taking advantage of the infrastructure you've got instead of buying all new launch vehicles. Alternatively, you can park the new one up in the Arctic, getting a different view of the sky.
Do the Mozilla folks have any good recommendations on when to use Firefox vs. Mozilla?
I'll probably update Firefox on my home machine, which is running an older Firefox version, but on my work machine, I'm using Mozilla, and I'll probably upgrade to the slightly newer Mozilla. Firefox was too buggy for me, at least up to version 0.8 - it would crash occasionally, usually when I had lots of tabs open, and too many plugins didn't work, and the plugin installers never seemed to work right for Firefox. (Part of this is because my work machine runs Win2K in You're Not The Administrator mode, so it's easier to get the basic Firefox installed but hard to get all the Java installed correctly.)
There are too many web sites out there that _know_ they can depend on the non-standard features of IE, so you can't get rid of it, because occasionally you'll need it. However, you can certainly tell most of your applications to use Firefox or Mozilla as your default browser.
Windows Update is important for me on my home machine, but the real issues are at work. Some critical websites, like the Siebel CRM interface, depend on IE scripting. It appears that the Webex conferencing system does too, though perhaps it could be talked into using newer Firefoxes?
Also, sometimes there are plugins that just don't work on Firefox. That's one reason I usually use Real Mozilla instead, because it's got the right Java versions included.
Bush can't be blamed for the crash, unless you're into conspiracy theories, but he can be blamed for running high-deficit voodoo economics ever since he and his military-industrial-complex cronies got into office. We're currently running the highest deficit in history, because he wants to pretend that a "tax cut" will fix things while radically increasing spending, mostly military spending, and isn't willing to take the responsibility for cutting other spending to make up for it. That kind of thing was possible (though bad) during the early Reagan years, but world capital markets work much differently these days, and the Keynesian "inflate away your debt" strategies just don't work. Bush also does economically disruptive political favors like steel tariffs, which look good to steelmaking voters in Pennsylvania but make steel more expensive for manufacturers of higher-value products like cars, so they're bad for the American manufacturing industry, which loses more jobs.
So what were the causes of the crash?
Silly business models attracting large amounts of money, which was lots of fun but obviously unsustainable. What really happened was that new technology promised radical changes in business, and it took the market a few years to determine the real values. For instance, most of the business models depended on web advertising to make money, and nobody knew what web advertising was really worth, and the number of people diving in to find out what the hype was about kept the value changing for a couple of years. Now the market has a much better idea of the value, and it's somewhere between the most optimistic believers (who got killed) and the most pessimistic (who missed opportunities.)
Moore's Law caught up with economics - the telecom technology changes meant that for a couple of years, it looked like putting fiber in the ground was a gold mine, so lots of people invested in it (and in the companies that sold equipment to them), but DWDM has meant that any fiber out there has near-infinite capacity, and demand for bits was growing rapidly but not that rapidly, so prices went into a death spiral, and haven't pulled out yet. It's happened somewhat with CPUs as well - Microsoft and Linux keep writing bloatware to soak up any available horsepower, but the only people who've actually needed the last five years of CPU progress have been gamers and a few scientists.
In January-February 2000, Alan Greenspan kicked up interest rates about six times, which was a major blow to a capital-intensive economic boom. You can blame this somewhat on Clintonomics, since Clinton made government spending look much better by refinancing old Reagan/Bush federal debt at much lower interest rates, especially short-term but also somewhat long-term. On the other hand, it's hard to see moves that aggressive early in an election year as other than politically-inspired manipulation, and it _was_ the economy, stupid.
And then there's the Microsoft anti-trust suit, which is Clinton's fault. The main dot-com VC cash-out strategies for startups were to sell the company to the public in an IPO or sell it directly to a big company (usually Microsoft for software/services companies and Cisco for hardware), and the threat to break up Microsoft meant that all of a sudden, they were no longer a potential customer for a couple of years. Therefore, VCs, who'd been on a feeding frenzy since Hotmail sold for $400M, had lost one of their three main markets, and the public was already getting skeptical about IPOs for Dogfood-on-line.com, and the New DotCom Economy already assumed that you wouldn't actually make Profits, at least in the short term, and with interest rates going up they needed a much higher probability of winning to make investing in startups worthwhile.
And it all pretty much happened at once, which is why it tanked so hard.
Obviously the world would be a better place if we could just issue AK47s and small thermonuclear devices to spam hunters, instead of wimpy tools like blacklists and Bayesian filters, and make the spammers an offer they can't refuse. However, that's not realistic, and the economics of the world are such that many spammers make money spamming, and wanabee spammers send out lots of spam attempting to make money even if they're not successful, fleeing the country virtually (whether or not you do it physically) is inexpensive enough to arbitrage away the effects of most anti-spam laws, and investigative and legal costs make it usually non-economical for any individual ISP or email recipient to hunt down spammers unless bounties are fairly high. So were stuck with the little pests.
So if you're an ISP, and you can't shoot the spammers, the choice is either to
spend a lot of resources to do spam filtering on your own machines, hoping to keep your customers relatively happy, or
provide really cool tools for your customers to run on their own machines, spending your money on transporting the spam rather than filtering it, and annoying some customers, or
don't filter the stuff at all, annoying more customers at a lower cost.
None of these solutions are very pleasant, but it looks like the first solution is the best choice for most ISPs, annoying as it is. And if you're that hotel manager in the situation you described, you try to get the police to stop drive-by shootings, but you also get yourself some bullet-proof glass so your customers don't get shot in the lobby.
If you're in the business of providing people email service, as opposed to generic ISP connectivity services, then yes, spam is a major fraction of your bandwidth. But if you're a connectivity-type ISP, like the traditional dial ISP or a DSL ISP, usually most of your bandwidth is web browsing these days, or P2P file sharing traffic, and email is a much smaller fraction of the total bits. Spam may be 80% of your email, depending on how much you blacklist at the SMTP layer rather than accepting and discarding, and it may be 90% of your complaint traffic, but it's usually not a lot of bits. (Viruses are different, because they can really dog out the network for a while.)
Why is it the ISP's burden to accommodate this theft of services? Because it's only theft if it's stolen from _somebody_, and as an ISP in a competitive market, you'd rather spend the money to provide better quality services than lose customers to other ISPs, so that means it's stolen from _you_.
It's also because tracing spammers sufficiently well that you can haul them into court and force them to pay is usually a lot more expensive, has a low probability of success, and if they're in the US where you can prosecute them, it usually just results in an uncollectable judgement against some low-life living in a double-wide trailer.
The bandwidth doesn't actually cost you much, compared to the legitimate web-surfing traffic of your users. Admin labor costs a lot. Complaint handling costs a lot (assuming you do it well.) Servers themselves are pretty cheap - yes, that 66 MHz Sparcstation can handle the non-spam load, but you can buy yourself a stack of $250 2GHz Celerons to handle most of the crunching labor; your choice as to whether to distribute the load using DNS or make it work in a single Beowulf cluster.
Sure, just hitting "D" doesn't take very long. If Spamboy can do that once a second, and he sent ten million spams last week, he ought to be done by spring.
It's not that the spammers' friends are loyal - it's that the better ones are making money spamming, and they don't want to lose the cash.
But bounties also mean that a spammer has to worry about unemployed highly skilled dotcommers or bored teenagers hunting them down for the reward money. Recent news reports indicate that about 500,000 tech people have lost jobs in the last couple of years. Spamhaus estimates that most of the world's spam comes from the top 200 spammers, so they're outnumbered 2500 to 1. At $100K a head for the winning spam-hunters, that'd be a mere $20M to catch them and shut them down; I'd think the big ISPs would pony up that kind of money just for the cost savings.
If you take the display off, it'll probably stay cooler, though it's more likely to have something bang into the keyboard. If that's not a problem, you're probably better taking it off. Also, if it's cooler, it's more likely not to run the fan.
Oh, lots of us Americans in the USA also collapsed into helpless laughter at the spectacle of the Americans freaking out.
Meanwhile, if the Europeans had a TV channel start broadcasting the kinds of programs about guns that show up on The History Channel over here, they'd freak out and we could laugh at them. (It's one thing to see guns on Westerns or James Bond cartoons or used by soldiers in black&white war movies, but the History Channel does show lots of stuff about guns in between war movies.) And then there's all the violence on movies on HBO and on the Schwarzenegger/Eastwood Rerun Channel. And that's not even counting the casual use of guns on the Outdoor Living Channel, where they broadcast people killing cute forest animals for entertainment.
Yes, Microsoft's try very hard to be backwards compatible so that third-party software applications will still run on newer versions of Windows. They don't try as hard for hardware, but the hardware makers can get enough information about the OS to do new drivers, and MS tries reasonably hard to include drivers for lots of hardware. However, MS Office tries very hard to be backwards INCOMPATIBLE, so your new version of Office can read old documents, but puts out new documents that older version of Office can't read, virally bullying everybody else into upgrading.
If MS bullied the hardware industry into making Linuxphobic hardware, they might get beaten up by antitrust people. However, if they encourage the industry to form standards committees, and dominate the activities of the standards committees, and the standards committees release standards that aren't implementable by Linux (e.g. because the license terms are wrong), that's unlikely to be an antitrust problem. I think they were one of the main players encouraging "legacy-free hardware", though there were a number of hardware vendors encouraging that also. It's still mostly a niche market, though USB seems to be increasingly common in mice, and of course there's the entire Mac market.
Most laptops have come with microphones built in over the last few years. They're not usually very exciting ones, but they're there, just as the built-in speakers are.
Desktop machines usually don't come with them, but you can get adequate ones for $2 if you want, and headsets with microphones on them for $10-25, so if you don't have a microphone on your desktop, it's because you haven't felt motivated to take the time trying out applications, not because it's an unnecessary expense.
Yes, of course you need to get details like that correct, at least if you're using a language where it's a problem, as opposed to a calculator language like bc / dc.
A few years ago, the obvious solution method would have been "Zone transfer.com and look for big strings of number" or "Use a domain name seller's site and look for names starting with 0, 1, 2, 3,.. 9". That would give you a small set of 10-digit domain names, and you'd only need to bother doing math if they'd gotten tricky, e.g. put in a few other numbers, some of which might not be prime, and some of which might not be digits of e, and some of which might be a string of prime numbers from e other than the first such. But it'd still be a much smaller problem.
Quantum Encryption lets you build a non-eavesdroppable tunnel between two ends of a fiber. Conventional encryption with adequately long keys lets you build non-eavesdroppable logical tunnels between two endpoints over any arbitrary set of IP transport. Most people haven't bothered deploying conventional IPSEC encryption which doesn't require stringing fiber, much less the harder-to-use quantum stuff.
Neither one helps the "hacked by Chinese" problem. That's because the hacked sites have connections to the public internet, so anybody in the world can send them packets, servers that listen to those packets, and buggy software that can be abused. Your web server might also be connected to your corporate data center using an IPSEC tunnel running on a quantum-encrypted dedicated fiber in a pressurized titanium conduit running through a moat protected by sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads, but that's not the path the Chinese hackers will use - they'll use your regular Internet connection.
Alternatively, if you're using the quantum-encrypted or mathematically-encrypted tunnel to connect to people who you shouldn't have trusted, they can still hack you, or if they have an open Internet connection on their machine as well as the tunnel to your machine, you may still be vulnerable.
Unfortunately, all the announcement said was "1. Buzzwords 2... 3. GRANT MONEY!", which is the academic version of "3. PROFIT!", so it's really hard to tell what they're talking about, or whether their ranting about "Silicon" is like otaku ranting about "Steam!"
The last time I worked with vision recognition people was in the early 90s, but the two basic approaches to the problem were
Conventional Algorithms using conventional CPUs or DSPs, so if you did any special chips they were just for running standard calculations faster, e.g. DSPs in parallel to implement your FFTs.
Neural Networks, which really are a lot easier to wire up in chips than to emulate in software. You can build the things out of FPGAs and burn them into ASICs once your design is done, and then of course you've got to interface them to more conventional I/O channels.
Does their call for silicon imply they're doing neural nets? Or just that they want to do dumb SIMD number-crunching? Hard to say.
Electronic voting machines are _more_ expensive. Diebold and Bush's other cronies made a nice pile of money shipping voting machines that can't be trusted and don't work reliably. It's conservative in the sense that the same people are more likely to get elected....
But Bush is certainly not a fiscal conservative anyway; he's spending money hand over fist on his War On Dislikable People Who Weren't Terrorists At The Time and ignoring the actual terrorists. When Reagan was promising to cut the taxes while raising military spending, Bush the Elder called it "Voodoo Economics". Bush the Lesser is practicing it, and because he's pumping much more money into the military than Reagan ever did, and is running a set of attacks on the Middle East to make oil prices go up rather than down, he's racking up debt far faster than even Reagan ever did, while increasing the size of government as well.
Yes, there are different ways to force Mozilla or Firefox to redraw. That doesn't mean that something isn't still broken, and if it's the browser, then the browser ought to fix it.
So there's new Firefox, and updated Mozilla. Are the browsers the same? (In the past, the answer was No, and I assume it's still no.) Which one should I pick?
Go ahead an run your Cray applications on your Commodore 64 hardware, and call me when you're finished. The other direction is worse - try running the important Commodore 64 apps on a Cray 2, and your frog will get run over the millisecond he steps off the curb, and the Space Invaders will kick your ass.
Just because the ship date isn't vapor, that doesn't mean the features work as advertised.
unless your citations are about radio stations playing records, in which case ignore this message....
The term "pirate radio" usually refers to radio stations operating without government permission near countries where the government has nationalized the airwaves to prevent the people from using it. Usually pirate radio involves ships and lots of drinking...
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It's not just that newer terrestrial technology can beat older orbital technology. It's that any time you update terrestrial technology, you can go update the thing, whereas the Hubble and its successors only get a major refresh every decade or so. So maybe a new Hubble replacement could be better than a new Antarctic telescope, but five years from now, the ground-based system will have 10 times as much computer horsepower just from normal Moore's law effects, plus it'll be able to take advantage of new optical developments, and if you need to replace the Antarctic scope, you can park the new one next door to the old one, taking advantage of the infrastructure you've got instead of buying all new launch vehicles. Alternatively, you can park the new one up in the Arctic, getting a different view of the sky.
I'll probably update Firefox on my home machine, which is running an older Firefox version, but on my work machine, I'm using Mozilla, and I'll probably upgrade to the slightly newer Mozilla. Firefox was too buggy for me, at least up to version 0.8 - it would crash occasionally, usually when I had lots of tabs open, and too many plugins didn't work, and the plugin installers never seemed to work right for Firefox. (Part of this is because my work machine runs Win2K in You're Not The Administrator mode, so it's easier to get the basic Firefox installed but hard to get all the Java installed correctly.)
Windows Update is important for me on my home machine, but the real issues are at work. Some critical websites, like the Siebel CRM interface, depend on IE scripting. It appears that the Webex conferencing system does too, though perhaps it could be talked into using newer Firefoxes?
Also, sometimes there are plugins that just don't work on Firefox. That's one reason I usually use Real Mozilla instead, because it's got the right Java versions included.
So what were the causes of the crash?
- Silly business models attracting large amounts of money, which was lots of fun but obviously unsustainable. What really happened was that new technology promised radical changes in business, and it took the market a few years to determine the real values. For instance, most of the business models depended on web advertising to make money, and nobody knew what web advertising was really worth, and the number of people diving in to find out what the hype was about kept the value changing for a couple of years. Now the market has a much better idea of the value, and it's somewhere between the most optimistic believers (who got killed) and the most pessimistic (who missed opportunities.)
- Moore's Law caught up with economics - the telecom technology changes meant that for a couple of years, it looked like putting fiber in the ground was a gold mine, so lots of people invested in it (and in the companies that sold equipment to them), but DWDM has meant that any fiber out there has near-infinite capacity, and demand for bits was growing rapidly but not that rapidly, so prices went into a death spiral, and haven't pulled out yet. It's happened somewhat with CPUs as well - Microsoft and Linux keep writing bloatware to soak up any available horsepower, but the only people who've actually needed the last five years of CPU progress have been gamers and a few scientists.
- In January-February 2000, Alan Greenspan kicked up interest rates about six times, which was a major blow to a capital-intensive economic boom. You can blame this somewhat on Clintonomics, since Clinton made government spending look much better by refinancing old Reagan/Bush federal debt at much lower interest rates, especially short-term but also somewhat long-term. On the other hand, it's hard to see moves that aggressive early in an election year as other than politically-inspired manipulation, and it _was_ the economy, stupid.
- And then there's the Microsoft anti-trust suit, which is Clinton's fault. The main dot-com VC cash-out strategies for startups were to sell the company to the public in an IPO or sell it directly to a big company (usually Microsoft for software/services companies and Cisco for hardware), and the threat to break up Microsoft meant that all of a sudden, they were no longer a potential customer for a couple of years. Therefore, VCs, who'd been on a feeding frenzy since Hotmail sold for $400M, had lost one of their three main markets, and the public was already getting skeptical about IPOs for Dogfood-on-line.com, and the New DotCom Economy already assumed that you wouldn't actually make Profits, at least in the short term, and with interest rates going up they needed a much higher probability of winning to make investing in startups worthwhile.
And it all pretty much happened at once, which is why it tanked so hard.So if you're an ISP, and you can't shoot the spammers, the choice is either to
- spend a lot of resources to do spam filtering on your own machines, hoping to keep your customers relatively happy, or
- provide really cool tools for your customers to run on their own machines, spending your money on transporting the spam rather than filtering it, and annoying some customers, or
- don't filter the stuff at all, annoying more customers at a lower cost.
None of these solutions are very pleasant, but it looks like the first solution is the best choice for most ISPs, annoying as it is. And if you're that hotel manager in the situation you described, you try to get the police to stop drive-by shootings, but you also get yourself some bullet-proof glass so your customers don't get shot in the lobby.If you're in the business of providing people email service, as opposed to generic ISP connectivity services, then yes, spam is a major fraction of your bandwidth. But if you're a connectivity-type ISP, like the traditional dial ISP or a DSL ISP, usually most of your bandwidth is web browsing these days, or P2P file sharing traffic, and email is a much smaller fraction of the total bits. Spam may be 80% of your email, depending on how much you blacklist at the SMTP layer rather than accepting and discarding, and it may be 90% of your complaint traffic, but it's usually not a lot of bits. (Viruses are different, because they can really dog out the network for a while.)
It's also because tracing spammers sufficiently well that you can haul them into court and force them to pay is usually a lot more expensive, has a low probability of success, and if they're in the US where you can prosecute them, it usually just results in an uncollectable judgement against some low-life living in a double-wide trailer.
The bandwidth doesn't actually cost you much, compared to the legitimate web-surfing traffic of your users. Admin labor costs a lot. Complaint handling costs a lot (assuming you do it well.) Servers themselves are pretty cheap - yes, that 66 MHz Sparcstation can handle the non-spam load, but you can buy yourself a stack of $250 2GHz Celerons to handle most of the crunching labor; your choice as to whether to distribute the load using DNS or make it work in a single Beowulf cluster.
I also use a KVM switch for my dead-screen laptop, but my cats like to help me with the computers, so the lid stays on...
Sure, just hitting "D" doesn't take very long. If Spamboy can do that once a second, and he sent ten million spams last week, he ought to be done by spring.
But bounties also mean that a spammer has to worry about unemployed highly skilled dotcommers or bored teenagers hunting them down for the reward money. Recent news reports indicate that about 500,000 tech people have lost jobs in the last couple of years. Spamhaus estimates that most of the world's spam comes from the top 200 spammers, so they're outnumbered 2500 to 1. At $100K a head for the winning spam-hunters, that'd be a mere $20M to catch them and shut them down; I'd think the big ISPs would pony up that kind of money just for the cost savings.
Yes, they're lovely boxes. But you could get a used laptop for $100-200 with a dead screen that will work about as well with fairly low power.
If you take the display off, it'll probably stay cooler, though it's more likely to have something bang into the keyboard. If that's not a problem, you're probably better taking it off. Also, if it's cooler, it's more likely not to run the fan.
Meanwhile, if the Europeans had a TV channel start broadcasting the kinds of programs about guns that show up on The History Channel over here, they'd freak out and we could laugh at them. (It's one thing to see guns on Westerns or James Bond cartoons or used by soldiers in black&white war movies, but the History Channel does show lots of stuff about guns in between war movies.) And then there's all the violence on movies on HBO and on the Schwarzenegger/Eastwood Rerun Channel. And that's not even counting the casual use of guns on the Outdoor Living Channel, where they broadcast people killing cute forest animals for entertainment.
If MS bullied the hardware industry into making Linuxphobic hardware, they might get beaten up by antitrust people. However, if they encourage the industry to form standards committees, and dominate the activities of the standards committees, and the standards committees release standards that aren't implementable by Linux (e.g. because the license terms are wrong), that's unlikely to be an antitrust problem. I think they were one of the main players encouraging "legacy-free hardware", though there were a number of hardware vendors encouraging that also. It's still mostly a niche market, though USB seems to be increasingly common in mice, and of course there's the entire Mac market.
Desktop machines usually don't come with them, but you can get adequate ones for $2 if you want, and headsets with microphones on them for $10-25, so if you don't have a microphone on your desktop, it's because you haven't felt motivated to take the time trying out applications, not because it's an unnecessary expense.
Yes, of course you need to get details like that correct, at least if you're using a language where it's a problem, as opposed to a calculator language like bc / dc.
A few years ago, the obvious solution method would have been "Zone transfer .com and look for big strings of number" or "Use a domain name seller's site and look for names starting with 0, 1, 2, 3, .. 9". That would give you a small set of 10-digit domain names, and you'd only need to bother doing math if they'd gotten tricky, e.g. put in a few other numbers, some of which might not be prime, and some of which might not be digits of e, and some of which might be a string of prime numbers from e other than the first such. But it'd still be a much smaller problem.
OK, Columbia Internet or whatever they're called, AJ and Miranda going to the South Pole. This week's userfriendly.org strip.
Neither one helps the "hacked by Chinese" problem. That's because the hacked sites have connections to the public internet, so anybody in the world can send them packets, servers that listen to those packets, and buggy software that can be abused. Your web server might also be connected to your corporate data center using an IPSEC tunnel running on a quantum-encrypted dedicated fiber in a pressurized titanium conduit running through a moat protected by sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads, but that's not the path the Chinese hackers will use - they'll use your regular Internet connection.
Alternatively, if you're using the quantum-encrypted or mathematically-encrypted tunnel to connect to people who you shouldn't have trusted, they can still hack you, or if they have an open Internet connection on their machine as well as the tunnel to your machine, you may still be vulnerable.
The last time I worked with vision recognition people was in the early 90s, but the two basic approaches to the problem were
- Conventional Algorithms using conventional CPUs or DSPs, so if you did any special chips they were just for running standard calculations faster, e.g. DSPs in parallel to implement your FFTs.
- Neural Networks, which really are a lot easier to wire up in chips than to emulate in software. You can build the things out of FPGAs and burn them into ASICs once your design is done, and then of course you've got to interface them to more conventional I/O channels.
Does their call for silicon imply they're doing neural nets? Or just that they want to do dumb SIMD number-crunching? Hard to say.But Bush is certainly not a fiscal conservative anyway; he's spending money hand over fist on his War On Dislikable People Who Weren't Terrorists At The Time and ignoring the actual terrorists. When Reagan was promising to cut the taxes while raising military spending, Bush the Elder called it "Voodoo Economics". Bush the Lesser is practicing it, and because he's pumping much more money into the military than Reagan ever did, and is running a set of attacks on the Middle East to make oil prices go up rather than down, he's racking up debt far faster than even Reagan ever did, while increasing the size of government as well.
Yes, there are different ways to force Mozilla or Firefox to redraw. That doesn't mean that something isn't still broken, and if it's the browser, then the browser ought to fix it.
So there's new Firefox, and updated Mozilla. Are the browsers the same? (In the past, the answer was No, and I assume it's still no.) Which one should I pick?
Just because the ship date isn't vapor, that doesn't mean the features work as advertised.
The term "pirate radio" usually refers to radio stations operating without government permission near countries where the government has nationalized the airwaves to prevent the people from using it. Usually pirate radio involves ships and lots of drinking...