Whenever I eat corn, I have corn in my poop. My body doesn't digest it very well you see. Am I going to be the solution to the world fuel shortage now? Am I going to be rich and famous?
Circuit City in Rochester, NY sucks. Went there to buy a printer for my Apple and Linux-based systems. The box said it was supported, but after a day or two with HP support they (HP) came to the conclusion they didn't have scanner drivers (yet). I went back to Circuit City and they didn't want to change or take back my printer. They would take it back if I went more expensive, otherwise there was a 15% restocking fee, said it was store/corporate policy. I said forget it, took the thing home and gave it to my parents who are running Ubuntu, a few months later the drivers for the scanner came. Never went back there again.
I went to Best Buy for some USB A-B cable. Best Buy wanted to charge me $25 for a 3 foot cable. Yeah but they're gold plated... I don't care, the signal isn't going to work any different. Well, it gives better quality prints... I said OK, now you're going too far, I'm outta here.
Radio Shack is just as incompetent. Give me a powered UHF/VHF antenna. Yeah right, 5 antenna's later (still in the shop, they gave me FM antenna's even a HAM-radio antenna) they said: this one is powered. Came home: no it isn't. Same thing for a simple power supply, how difficult is it to find a 9V, 1,5A power supply? I only have this 1500 Amp one "Uh, let me see, yes, 1500mA is 1,5A, thank you, I'll go with that one"
Ever since, I've only been shopping online. If I need something really bad, I'll do overnight shipping, saves me a lot of time, gas and headache.
The 3 laws my friend: If there is a possibility of doing harm by a certain action of the robot, it should not execute that action. Of course robot's (and even humans) have a poor foresight and life is not black and white so if it didn't fall (for example if it fell on the rail tracks) would it cause more harm/death/carnage with it's metal under the train, possibly derailing and harming 100's of people than it would've done when it would've pushed the child to protect itself from falling on the tracks. Life's questions are always so fun to calculate.
The problem is not cross-referencing patterns because machines nor humans can detect patterns that well to match up 2 datasets that are only related by patterns especially among a large population. So technically, to be totally perfect, you should release the anonymized data of EVERYBODY and filter out cases that are truly unique (can be done simply with keywords).
The main issue with AOL's and Netflix is that they released data that was self-referencing the user using substitution to replace names with uid's. This way, you can group the data by uid and then look for unique name/words in the set, then match it against an existing database of known AOL/Netflix users to look for matches. If AOL/Netflix would've done the same thing and replaced those unique words/names with a generic word, the researchers would've had much more trouble matching up the users. The same is true for phone numbers, addresses, bank cards and zip codes. Heck even a few simple perl scripts could've done that.
That's kinda weird because yesterday I walked through the mall and GameStop and a few other resellers have boxes of them stacked up in the window with a flashy price tag (~250 if I remember). I guess I should go buy to see if they're just for promo or if they have any in stock.
According to the article: including the close to 30,000 file-sharing lawsuits filed by the record labels in the US alone.
I mean, this is way worse than what I thought it was. I thought it was a handful, you know the ones you hear about in the news. But 30,000 means a lot and a whole lot of work for the legal system (this means that 1 in every 500 lawsuits in the US or 0,2% comes directly from the RIAA). This could be used for other cases we are already overloaded with like drugs, robberies, fraud (identity theft for example), money laundering and other crimes that affect more people than a few copied cd's.
Well, yes, that's why we need a law that says open standards should be used. Currently if you want to get something from the government, you get PDF or DOC files sometimes even WordPerfect files. If you want to interact with the government you need to send it using paper, some halfassed web form that only works with IE or PDF or DOC or implement some type of arcane XML which you only have access to if you are a developer.
The law should require open formats to be used by everyone for any interaction with the government. That way, when Sun, Microsoft or Corel goes/went belly-up or defuncts because China takes over the businesses we can still pay somebody to re-implement the document format or create a converter for it. The same goes when we need our documents within a hundred years for educational, historical or legal purposes. They should be fairly plain text (no binary XML) with a good description of what it was like and how to read those documents. Do you think somebody will be able to figure out how Office 97 doc format files work within 100 years?
Of course, the fact that currently only a few document formats are available under this format with the main one being ODF is not the governments fault, it's Microsoft's. If Microsoft would have made a truly open standard (and not just call it open but keep it closed) with a decent implementation (the current one is flawed beyond recognition of any document standard). Other open formats are XHTML, SGML, that new one W3C is developing, KOffice has a document format as well as a bunch of other minor open source word processors
Well, the main goal of a nuclear bomb is for it to be a 'bomb'. Although a lot more explosive can be packed in a smaller package, resulting in a larger damage than conventional explosives, the decay of the particles is so fast after the explosion that slow-death-by-radiation amounts to only a small area outside the blast radius.
Laptops are more and more becoming desktop replacements that you can take on your lap sitting down in your couch or status symbols to people that think bigger is better. Give a 19" laptop with 10 minutes battery and many people would still buy it although there are desktops that both outperform those systems and take less space although less known to the public.
I was thinking the same thing. Next time I go for a ride in the area's they're deployed, I'll launch one of those "cheap" model airplanes with a remote control and a camera (can be had from a few hundred dollars) and either destroy it (collide) or force it down somehow, go pick it up and gut it for parts. Before a real cop can dispatch to the area it's down, I'll have the battery unplugged and driven off into the mass.
Well, then the supplier company needs to invest in extending it's capacity just like internet providers need to upgrade their bandwidth. To massively extend capacity using relatively little space, we'll need more nuclear sites instead of coal/oil/gas burning electricity generators which need lots of space and supporting infrastructure and generate not very much power in comparison. After all, we're all getting massively charged for a little bit of electricity (pun not intended) while generation itself doesn't cost that much AND is generally co-funded by our tax dollars.
Same happens on Mac OS X with a PowerPC G4. Adobe's plugin will eat up 100% cpu for something as simple as a video or a game while other things like Java plugins or real video doesn't take anything.
I wonder why higher management always wants to centralize their resources. The internet protocol and subsequent many IT applications were built to be efficient in small and decentralized environments.
1) Trying to centralize gives us large expensive computers that are made out of the same components as smaller ones and thus fail just as the smaller ones do, however, ever trying to cram more crap on the same machine will bring down everything at once whenever it fails. 2) Trying to centralize has the ultimate goal to eliminate jobs but they need those people since they know all the little details and hickups their systems have. If people know a project is going to eliminate their job, they won't be cooperative. IT not being cooperative is very bad in this world where everything is computerized. 3) Eventually the same number of people is going to have to work in the centralized system just because you also centralize the problems and more problems will bring more people, more people will bring more overhead and inefficiency, more inefficiency will bring more people (at least that's the default in today's business world, throwing more people at an IT problem doesn't make it disappear faster) 4) More people in a project that was designed to be more cost efficient means the managers will have to cut expenses. Cut expenses brings underpaid people, underpaid people bring less or no experience and higher turnover, higher turnover means more cutting expenses.
Therefore: keep your local IT guy(s) and infrastructure although you can't squeeze 100% of work/day and it will bring a little more expense. The end-users have a better relationship with the guy(s) and that makes happier people. Centralizing brings more overhead, less customer-interaction with IT and thus more inefficiency throughout the business.
Well, you have to account for the differences in economy though. $5000 these days is not much for us, but 100 years ago, $5000 would've bought you Manhattan (I am exaggerating, I know, but it's for the sake of example). In those countries (I haven't checked on S. Korea) it might be that official's yearly income. How would you feel if somebody cut you (by comparison) a $100,000-$200,000 check just to let something small disappear?
Of course those "application firewalls" also run software that can be (if not more easily) exploited or run the same operating systems as your server boxes (BSD or Linux). I run a full Linux/BSD/Mac shop and every computer has it's own public IP (1 to 1 NAT). The firewall is basically a Cisco router that does filtering on ports/IP. I don't really trust the firewall because it's not owned by me rather, IT Services (I'm part of a larger institution) has full control from a few computers over all the firewalls and they have a huge list with passwords. Their practices, keeping password lists laying around in the office, calling over the (wireless, unencrypted) phone to get them, running Windows on the desktop is not really what I would call secure so I trust my firewalls less than I trust my users and their computers.
New luxury cars are being developed (some BMW and Mercedes - I don't know if they're being sold) that don't even have a direct connection between the steering wheel and the drive train. Instead, it's all computerized with some type of central bus system. This allows for much smoother/easier handling. The same is happening to gas pedals although I think emergency braking is required to have a hard link, they could take that out if they have a better replacement (brake lines leak & break after a while so directly controlled electronic brakes without the full hydrolic system would be great).
It's sad that the industry is still sticking to the x86 instruction set. It should've been replaced a long time ago with a pure RISC instruction set especially now with the quest for less power-hungry chips. The Power/PowerPC architecture was good but because they didn't have enough demand, the price was high and development low. A few failures (compare to Netburst) and their customers (amongst them Apple) went running to the competitors.
We're still running PowerPC here because they're low-power and do certain mathematics very well (I'm not the science guy). Hopefully Apple will switch back to PowerPC or so now that they are fully "Universal" and IBM has some promising chips lined up.
You mean the companies and enterprises that still run Windows even though Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and has screwed over customers, suppliers and partners?
I work at one of those MRI places and we do research and we are a non-profit. Although we're quite fully booked every day the use of the MRI still cost ~$500/hour. Basically the cost of operation divided by the number of scans done last year makes the price. Or do you think supercooling magnets to ~5K (that's Kelvin, convert to Celsius or Fahrenheit yourself) 24/7, the machine itself (~$3m) and support contract (~$125k) are paid for by the government not talking about the workstations to process the data and of course, my daily food?
About the article: those pictures are pretty unclear but it's promising.
I forgot to mention the data limit: You have 10GB (Gigabyte) per month download and 1 (or 2) Gigabyte upload (and it's not even that with the cheapest subscription). If you go over that by just 1 byte you have the remainder of the month a cable subscription at 48kbps down/16kbps up (not kidding, slower than dial-up) and dial-up is charged by the minute with a download limit of 10MB. Those limits remain up to the 30MBps subscriptions after which you go to business users. I would much rather have had (back in Belgium) a 1,5MBps line with no data limits than a 30MBps line that you can use for only 2 hours.
Oh, and for business users. 30MBps synchronous (up/down) speeds on a single copper, without redundancy for a datacenter can cost you $1000/month, 1GBps fiber with redundancy costs about $10,000. Depending on your location of course.
Theoretically that would work fine, but the companies that are forced to give up programming, even at sub-market prices are then going to have to raise the prices on the carrying side just to make up for their losses and in the end, the customer pays more for less.
That's what happens when government regulation steps in. Look in Europe where that happened with both public transport as well as datacommunications: The company that was once fully or partially owned by the government got sold but had to allow other carriers onto their networks and the prices skyrocketed. Belgium is one of those places where you easily pay $50 for any random carrier for 3MBps down and 128k up. I worked at the major phone line owner (Belgacom) and they charged their competitors so much for use of their lines it wasn't profitable enough to keep the low prices and if they had to they deteriorated the lines so much that some of the local ones got out of business. Telenet has a contract with the government for all cable networks in Flanders for the next 50 years and won't even allow other carriers on so they can also jack up the prices.
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Whenever I eat corn, I have corn in my poop. My body doesn't digest it very well you see. Am I going to be the solution to the world fuel shortage now? Am I going to be rich and famous?
Circuit City in Rochester, NY sucks. Went there to buy a printer for my Apple and Linux-based systems. The box said it was supported, but after a day or two with HP support they (HP) came to the conclusion they didn't have scanner drivers (yet). I went back to Circuit City and they didn't want to change or take back my printer. They would take it back if I went more expensive, otherwise there was a 15% restocking fee, said it was store/corporate policy. I said forget it, took the thing home and gave it to my parents who are running Ubuntu, a few months later the drivers for the scanner came. Never went back there again.
I went to Best Buy for some USB A-B cable. Best Buy wanted to charge me $25 for a 3 foot cable. Yeah but they're gold plated... I don't care, the signal isn't going to work any different. Well, it gives better quality prints... I said OK, now you're going too far, I'm outta here.
Radio Shack is just as incompetent. Give me a powered UHF/VHF antenna. Yeah right, 5 antenna's later (still in the shop, they gave me FM antenna's even a HAM-radio antenna) they said: this one is powered. Came home: no it isn't. Same thing for a simple power supply, how difficult is it to find a 9V, 1,5A power supply? I only have this 1500 Amp one "Uh, let me see, yes, 1500mA is 1,5A, thank you, I'll go with that one"
Ever since, I've only been shopping online. If I need something really bad, I'll do overnight shipping, saves me a lot of time, gas and headache.
The 3 laws my friend: If there is a possibility of doing harm by a certain action of the robot, it should not execute that action. Of course robot's (and even humans) have a poor foresight and life is not black and white so if it didn't fall (for example if it fell on the rail tracks) would it cause more harm/death/carnage with it's metal under the train, possibly derailing and harming 100's of people than it would've done when it would've pushed the child to protect itself from falling on the tracks. Life's questions are always so fun to calculate.
The problem is not cross-referencing patterns because machines nor humans can detect patterns that well to match up 2 datasets that are only related by patterns especially among a large population. So technically, to be totally perfect, you should release the anonymized data of EVERYBODY and filter out cases that are truly unique (can be done simply with keywords).
The main issue with AOL's and Netflix is that they released data that was self-referencing the user using substitution to replace names with uid's. This way, you can group the data by uid and then look for unique name/words in the set, then match it against an existing database of known AOL/Netflix users to look for matches. If AOL/Netflix would've done the same thing and replaced those unique words/names with a generic word, the researchers would've had much more trouble matching up the users. The same is true for phone numbers, addresses, bank cards and zip codes. Heck even a few simple perl scripts could've done that.
That's kinda weird because yesterday I walked through the mall and GameStop and a few other resellers have boxes of them stacked up in the window with a flashy price tag (~250 if I remember). I guess I should go buy to see if they're just for promo or if they have any in stock.
According to the article:
including the close to 30,000 file-sharing lawsuits filed by the record labels in the US alone.
I mean, this is way worse than what I thought it was. I thought it was a handful, you know the ones you hear about in the news. But 30,000 means a lot and a whole lot of work for the legal system (this means that 1 in every 500 lawsuits in the US or 0,2% comes directly from the RIAA). This could be used for other cases we are already overloaded with like drugs, robberies, fraud (identity theft for example), money laundering and other crimes that affect more people than a few copied cd's.
Depending on what you want it's between 50c and $1,50 per foot. Compare that to CAT5e which is $0,05/foot, multiply by 200.
Well, yes, that's why we need a law that says open standards should be used. Currently if you want to get something from the government, you get PDF or DOC files sometimes even WordPerfect files. If you want to interact with the government you need to send it using paper, some halfassed web form that only works with IE or PDF or DOC or implement some type of arcane XML which you only have access to if you are a developer.
The law should require open formats to be used by everyone for any interaction with the government. That way, when Sun, Microsoft or Corel goes/went belly-up or defuncts because China takes over the businesses we can still pay somebody to re-implement the document format or create a converter for it. The same goes when we need our documents within a hundred years for educational, historical or legal purposes. They should be fairly plain text (no binary XML) with a good description of what it was like and how to read those documents. Do you think somebody will be able to figure out how Office 97 doc format files work within 100 years?
Of course, the fact that currently only a few document formats are available under this format with the main one being ODF is not the governments fault, it's Microsoft's. If Microsoft would have made a truly open standard (and not just call it open but keep it closed) with a decent implementation (the current one is flawed beyond recognition of any document standard). Other open formats are XHTML, SGML, that new one W3C is developing, KOffice has a document format as well as a bunch of other minor open source word processors
That's what you get for trying to run Windows.
I know this will burn my karma.
Well, the main goal of a nuclear bomb is for it to be a 'bomb'. Although a lot more explosive can be packed in a smaller package, resulting in a larger damage than conventional explosives, the decay of the particles is so fast after the explosion that slow-death-by-radiation amounts to only a small area outside the blast radius.
Laptops are more and more becoming desktop replacements that you can take on your lap sitting down in your couch or status symbols to people that think bigger is better. Give a 19" laptop with 10 minutes battery and many people would still buy it although there are desktops that both outperform those systems and take less space although less known to the public.
I was thinking the same thing. Next time I go for a ride in the area's they're deployed, I'll launch one of those "cheap" model airplanes with a remote control and a camera (can be had from a few hundred dollars) and either destroy it (collide) or force it down somehow, go pick it up and gut it for parts. Before a real cop can dispatch to the area it's down, I'll have the battery unplugged and driven off into the mass.
Well, then the supplier company needs to invest in extending it's capacity just like internet providers need to upgrade their bandwidth. To massively extend capacity using relatively little space, we'll need more nuclear sites instead of coal/oil/gas burning electricity generators which need lots of space and supporting infrastructure and generate not very much power in comparison. After all, we're all getting massively charged for a little bit of electricity (pun not intended) while generation itself doesn't cost that much AND is generally co-funded by our tax dollars.
Same happens on Mac OS X with a PowerPC G4. Adobe's plugin will eat up 100% cpu for something as simple as a video or a game while other things like Java plugins or real video doesn't take anything.
I wonder why higher management always wants to centralize their resources. The internet protocol and subsequent many IT applications were built to be efficient in small and decentralized environments.
1) Trying to centralize gives us large expensive computers that are made out of the same components as smaller ones and thus fail just as the smaller ones do, however, ever trying to cram more crap on the same machine will bring down everything at once whenever it fails.
2) Trying to centralize has the ultimate goal to eliminate jobs but they need those people since they know all the little details and hickups their systems have. If people know a project is going to eliminate their job, they won't be cooperative. IT not being cooperative is very bad in this world where everything is computerized.
3) Eventually the same number of people is going to have to work in the centralized system just because you also centralize the problems and more problems will bring more people, more people will bring more overhead and inefficiency, more inefficiency will bring more people (at least that's the default in today's business world, throwing more people at an IT problem doesn't make it disappear faster)
4) More people in a project that was designed to be more cost efficient means the managers will have to cut expenses. Cut expenses brings underpaid people, underpaid people bring less or no experience and higher turnover, higher turnover means more cutting expenses.
Therefore: keep your local IT guy(s) and infrastructure although you can't squeeze 100% of work/day and it will bring a little more expense. The end-users have a better relationship with the guy(s) and that makes happier people. Centralizing brings more overhead, less customer-interaction with IT and thus more inefficiency throughout the business.
Well, you have to account for the differences in economy though. $5000 these days is not much for us, but 100 years ago, $5000 would've bought you Manhattan (I am exaggerating, I know, but it's for the sake of example). In those countries (I haven't checked on S. Korea) it might be that official's yearly income. How would you feel if somebody cut you (by comparison) a $100,000-$200,000 check just to let something small disappear?
Standard Hushmail downloads (& caches) an applet on your computer that encrypts & decrypts your private key with your passphrase.
<Adam Savage (from Mythbusters) voice:> Well, there's your problem...
Of course those "application firewalls" also run software that can be (if not more easily) exploited or run the same operating systems as your server boxes (BSD or Linux). I run a full Linux/BSD/Mac shop and every computer has it's own public IP (1 to 1 NAT). The firewall is basically a Cisco router that does filtering on ports/IP. I don't really trust the firewall because it's not owned by me rather, IT Services (I'm part of a larger institution) has full control from a few computers over all the firewalls and they have a huge list with passwords. Their practices, keeping password lists laying around in the office, calling over the (wireless, unencrypted) phone to get them, running Windows on the desktop is not really what I would call secure so I trust my firewalls less than I trust my users and their computers.
That type of power steering already exists. I have it in my 97 Buick Park Avenue. I just had it replaced too, an expensive bugger.
New luxury cars are being developed (some BMW and Mercedes - I don't know if they're being sold) that don't even have a direct connection between the steering wheel and the drive train. Instead, it's all computerized with some type of central bus system. This allows for much smoother/easier handling. The same is happening to gas pedals although I think emergency braking is required to have a hard link, they could take that out if they have a better replacement (brake lines leak & break after a while so directly controlled electronic brakes without the full hydrolic system would be great).
It's sad that the industry is still sticking to the x86 instruction set. It should've been replaced a long time ago with a pure RISC instruction set especially now with the quest for less power-hungry chips. The Power/PowerPC architecture was good but because they didn't have enough demand, the price was high and development low. A few failures (compare to Netburst) and their customers (amongst them Apple) went running to the competitors.
We're still running PowerPC here because they're low-power and do certain mathematics very well (I'm not the science guy). Hopefully Apple will switch back to PowerPC or so now that they are fully "Universal" and IBM has some promising chips lined up.
You mean the companies and enterprises that still run Windows even though Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and has screwed over customers, suppliers and partners?
I work at one of those MRI places and we do research and we are a non-profit. Although we're quite fully booked every day the use of the MRI still cost ~$500/hour. Basically the cost of operation divided by the number of scans done last year makes the price. Or do you think supercooling magnets to ~5K (that's Kelvin, convert to Celsius or Fahrenheit yourself) 24/7, the machine itself (~$3m) and support contract (~$125k) are paid for by the government not talking about the workstations to process the data and of course, my daily food?
About the article: those pictures are pretty unclear but it's promising.
I forgot to mention the data limit: You have 10GB (Gigabyte) per month download and 1 (or 2) Gigabyte upload (and it's not even that with the cheapest subscription). If you go over that by just 1 byte you have the remainder of the month a cable subscription at 48kbps down/16kbps up (not kidding, slower than dial-up) and dial-up is charged by the minute with a download limit of 10MB. Those limits remain up to the 30MBps subscriptions after which you go to business users. I would much rather have had (back in Belgium) a 1,5MBps line with no data limits than a 30MBps line that you can use for only 2 hours.
Oh, and for business users. 30MBps synchronous (up/down) speeds on a single copper, without redundancy for a datacenter can cost you $1000/month, 1GBps fiber with redundancy costs about $10,000. Depending on your location of course.
Theoretically that would work fine, but the companies that are forced to give up programming, even at sub-market prices are then going to have to raise the prices on the carrying side just to make up for their losses and in the end, the customer pays more for less.
That's what happens when government regulation steps in. Look in Europe where that happened with both public transport as well as datacommunications: The company that was once fully or partially owned by the government got sold but had to allow other carriers onto their networks and the prices skyrocketed. Belgium is one of those places where you easily pay $50 for any random carrier for 3MBps down and 128k up. I worked at the major phone line owner (Belgacom) and they charged their competitors so much for use of their lines it wasn't profitable enough to keep the low prices and if they had to they deteriorated the lines so much that some of the local ones got out of business. Telenet has a contract with the government for all cable networks in Flanders for the next 50 years and won't even allow other carriers on so they can also jack up the prices.