This is yet another one-trick pony. Basically, a few years ago, desperate investors, not yet burnt enough by the dotcom boom, realised they should be backing "mobile" ventures. Anything would do, as long as it was "mobile".
Note that these guys charge £100 / year ($220). Given that the average mobile would cost £200 to replace (tops, brand new) and you get a free one every year or two with a contract - they are suggesting you pay an insurance premium of c. 50% of the phone value, for a phone which you'll probably be getting rid of soon - and which the networks will disable if you report stolen. Oh yeah, and you don't actually get the phone back, it just screams.
To be fair - the real benefit is that it backs up the data on the phone; but if you're sensitive enough to spend £100/yr on this service, you ought to find a better way. The fact that this is "Home Office and Police backed" just goes to show how readily these agencies piss our money on pointlessness.
Bill Gates - genuinely philanthropic - his ego might like the fact that he is the man that's saving the world, but at least he's saving other people. The paypal guy has just looked in the mirror, realised he's getting older, and wants to live longer. He's worked out that if a few days' coding, some neat financial agreements and a bit of luck can make hundreds of millions of dollars; perhaps a few million dollars and some injecting of mice can lead to him living forever. The guy is more Frankenstien than philanthropist. Job done.
Thank goodness Slashdot's there to help publicise not only ground breaking new books, but even new editions. I really wouldn't want to miss the opportunity to discover why I need to buy book v2.0. Does anyone remember when Slashdot wasn't quite so heavily infected by the insideous PR virus?
50,000 jobs at, say, $60,000 each = $3bn. That's $3bn on top of license fees. That's $3bn just to do what you can do already. That's not good. Of course, moving to Linux is hardly cheap on support, but there's no license fee. Seems to me that this would be an ideal time to switch (not that big companies will). Still - it's hilarious that papers will carry this sort of PR puffery from Microsoft without question.
The UK's issue is that our government is obsessed with passing new laws to be seen to be doing something. Pretty much everything that matters is already a crime, but there's a general incompetence and mind-boggling bureacracy in our criminal justice system which renders most laws meaningless (people commit them, often repeatedly and openly).
An example - I was a witness in a court case and things were falling apart through multiple failures. I asked "who's in charge here?" And noone knew. Not the police, not the lawyers, certainly not the administrators, clerks and officials. It took four dates over a year and a half to heaqr a case of very very minor assualt (I was the victim. Believe me, it was minor).
The government's answer is just to keep passing more laws, and enforcing them on the basis of ease of prosecution rather than importance (speed cameras abound, as do parking wardens. Not too many police officers in sight, but plenty of thugs and robbers). I guess that much violent porn would be downloaded on p2p - so the cops can just use simple bots to hunt out the newly-defined miscreants. Leave this country now.
Let's all learn unicode binary and we will all be happy with just 2 keys. Imagine the efficiency! I've been doing it for some time now. Who needs 108 pesky keys.
Or should I say
01001100011001010111010000100111011100110010000001 100001011011000110110000100000
01101100011001010110000101110010011011100010000001 110101011011100110100101100011
01101111011001000110010100100000011000100110100101 101110011000010111001001111001
00100000011000010110111001100100001000000111011101 100101001000000111011101101001
01101100011011000010000001100001011011000110110000 100000011000100110010100100000
01101000011000010111000001110000011110010010000001 110111011010010111010001101000
00100000011010100111010101110011011101000010000000 110010001000000110101101100101
01111001011100110010111000100000010010010110110101 100001011001110110100101101110
01100101001000000111010001101000011001010010000001 100101011001100110011001101001
01100011011010010110010101101110011000110111100100 100001001000000100100100100111
01110110011001010010000001100010011001010110010101 101110001000000110010001101111
01101001011011100110011100100000011010010111010000 100000011001100110111101110010
00100000011100110110111101101101011001010010000001 110100011010010110110101100101
00100000011011100110111101110111001011100010000001 010111011010000110111100100000
01101110011001010110010101100100011100110010000000 110001001100000011100000100000
01110000011001010111001101101011011110010010000001 101011011001010111100101110011
00101110?
"... So, here we are, it is almost a month since the 700GB of email and mailing lists were lost and we still have no recovered data to return to you. This is of course upsetting for us, and even more so for the customers whose data has been affected. The longer we wait for the equipment to be returned to us the greater the risk we run of hitting other capacity issues that we know are ahead of us, and we do not feel that we can justify any longer a wait, and still be taking the appropriate action for our customers... "
If I had deleted 700 GB of customer email, I'd keep trying to recover it and buy replacement equipment to meet the capacity needs of the business. There shouldn't need to be a trade-off. Plusnet should keep trying to recover, and buy some more kit to look after their customers.
Actually - some car-based GPS systems link up to the car's other sensors (accelerometer, speed, steering, parking radar, etc). While they're not accurate for any long distance, they're perfectly good for a short distance (maybe a few hundred metres) and the software in the system can use this info in the temporary absence of a GPS signal.
Technologies used are irrelevant, from a business point of view (don't flame that) - it's all about market share. Google are running away with the search market - and with it, the future of advertising. New entrants have no chance, so the only competition is going to come from the existing players getting their act together. Both yahoo and MS have embedded user bases which will erode unless they can get to a par with google. If this means rewriting some code base, or MS having to rely on oss for a while, so be it. If they don't rapidly tackle google, they'll lose a lot of $$ in the medium term, and lose their business in the long term. Of course - one day the US Govt could break google up (Bell style) but they've never done that with MS, so MS really do have to win the web war to survive and at the moment they're being pulped by google. Yahoo may offer a shortcut to victory (or at least a more even fight).
I'd much rather entrepreneurial organisations like google do this than Governments doing it themselves.
As ever - the British Government wasted millions of pounds on a poorly thought through and badly implemented project to bring all of e-government together - direct.gov.uk.
Specifically to the google point; some British techs came up with the rather cheaper www.directionlessgov.com - which compares google results when you search for government terms to the results from direct.gov.uk. Unsurprisingly - google turns out to be rather more effective than the government.
The real outcome of this was a massive transfer of money from other countries to the UK, rather than true realisation of the value of 3G. As first mover, the UK was fiercely competed over by the companies, in a superbly devised auction. Other countries quickly tried to copy - but after a couple more countries, the global mobile phone operators realised how much money they were spending on the licenses, rather than actually building the networks. Some nations ended up giving away licenses as the telco's stopped paying for the licenses. Effectively cross-subsidising from other countries to the UK. In fact, it has been calculated that if the mobile companies are ever to cover their costs for the UK licenses that they'll need ARPU of £600 per year. Even at present costs, that's a lot of World Cup snippets. The big lesson is that forcing companies to overcompete for spectrum by creating scarcity through regulation may well be an apparently attractive short-term solution, especially to tax-hungry Europe, but has major long-term downsides.
The BBC site says that the raid was carried out by 50 police officers. In one way, it's good to know that Britain's not the only country which mismanages its police resources so badly, but it still seems hugely disproportionate (techy types not known for their violent resistance tactics). Presumably, the operation would have been just as effective (and arguably, just as wrong) with a couple of officers, a couple of techy coppers, and a couple of big blokes to hump off the servers. It does send out a signal about the recording industry's perverse hold on the authorities. I'd love to the monopolies commission going to the HQ of a big record company with 50 officers to seize a few price-fixing files. Somehow I think it won't happen.
The terrifying thought is that our gullible leaders will be sold this concept by Microsoft. I can just hear the Home Office justifying buying 100,000 pay as you go PCs as being a lower initial outlay followed by predictable payments and insurance against upgrades (that's upgrades from the monopolistic supplier, Microsoft who's leasing it to them).
Just imagine - the UK government buys 100,000 top end PC's for £1000 each and then pays £1000 over 3 years for each copy of Windows... not possible? I wish.
Basically - MS acquired Giant and started offering free Spyware within XP SP2. I'm sure these guys would have liked to have been acquired by MS - they might even have been in the running.
No chance of a trade sale now - they've taken too much funding to provide backers with an attractive exit, and now they're stuck with having to fight against a product which will not only be free, but be part of the operating system which really needs it.
Other than Firefox (which is also free), how many pieces of software have ever beaten that combination in the mass market? Given that it's impossible for most people to determine which is the better anti spyware product, the CEO's claim that people will choose a superior solution is pretty weak.
Their options now are pretty rapidly to widen the offering (in which case the CEO's claim is pointless) or to provide a niche service to businesses (which is fine).
The lesson? You can occasionally make money by offering a single software solution, but if you're betting your shirt - back a company that has more than omne product.
How accurate is the Mac's motion detection? Does this mean I should trade in my PC, stick a Mac in my rucksack, and let it work out how many calories I burn cycling to work?
Clearly you're not in America - or you'd be looking for miles per hour. Or inches per week. Or feet per day. Actually, I'm in Britain and we're just as bad. Sorry.
In London, we now pay for access to the roads. If I want to drive into Central London I have to pay for 'bandwidth' in the congested area [if I use low bandwidth access, like a motorcycle, I don't pay]. This is directly analogous to the fact that I pay for my broadband access at home. [some commentators might discuss other road charges, such as road tax and petrol tax too]
The idea of service providers paying the ISP's for preferential access to customers is a bit like charging shops for my car usage. It would be like having a toll booth at the entry points to the City, asking me where I'll be shopping, then charging the shops for my access [potentially allowing me to go on faster roads if I'm visiting high paying shops]. At the very periphery of the real world this might just work [a shop are so keen for your custom that they will send a limo to collect you] but if this policy were applied wholesale, it'd lead to the death of the City's commercial centre.
The logistics are simpler in the case of the internet, but the principle applies. Economic dynamism is achieved by having plenty of vendors vying for business. Economies which restrict this stagnate. The internet will stagnate if middlemen [ISP's] try to choose which sites we can visit [they may profit, but the consumer will not]. As ISP's enjoy a degree of natural monopoly, it behoves governments to prevent this potential abuse.
One of the greatest drivers of economic development across Africa is the mobile phone. It's done more for development than almost any number of international agencies. The mobile phone has enabled people to find out what's happening in other parts of their country, or other parts of the world, without having to go there. It enables farmers to find out what prices are in markets, or traders to find stock. It's even allowed millions of kids to set up their own telecoms businesses, with phone booths providing affordable calls to local people.
Affordable computers will enable similar progress. Not everyone needs one - although you'll be surprised how many people will be able to scrimp, save and trade. But many communities will, in one way or another, get one. Typical ingenuity will enable people to do all kinds of things we won't anticipate. Allowing them the freedom to share, innovate, discover and get entrepreneurial will drive incomes up and improve democracy. So much better than the usual well-meaning but ineffectual direct attempts to improve lives in developing countries.
To be fair - the Comet was revolutionary in many ways - especially being the first commercial jet airliner. The metal fatigue which caused it to crash was not known about until the crashes. First mover disadvantage. Because the British investigated the crashes so thoroughly, subsequent airliners could ensure they weren't prone to the issue. A great shame that DeHavilland did all the work and a bunch of people died for Boeing to benefit.
Seriously. What I find amusing here is the collection of comments about "stupid kid" and similar.
No way. This guy knew what he was doing; he thought it would be quite funny to see what happened - and he was rewarded with years of amusing misdirected messages followed by a flurry of activity on the web.
Well done him.
Years ago - a secretary in my office "was shocked" to discover that British Airways voicemail could be broken into by using # followed by the PIN 4444 when prompted for options 1-n. The SUN newspaper in the UK carried the story prominently - after we changed the messages. This was brilliant. Just what she was hoping for when she type '#4444'. And similarly - he's got just what he was hoping for.
Just think about the email admins in charge of testing.com, test.com and 123.com. They must have a field day.
Processor bugs have been around as long as processors. For example, I remember on the Z80, Zilog didn't particularly confess to the bugs - they just didn't list the affected instructions in the documentation. By looking at the byte codes, programmers were able to spot where an instruction be. Upon trying it - usually, you'd find that it largely did what it should but with a few unexpected behaviours. Once understood - you could pretty happily deploy them, with the caveat that Zilog might change the processor and render them unuseable. If memory serves me right, 'unofficial' instructions constituted 5-10% of the instruction set.
In he case of bugs in modern processors - as long as they are published, fully understood, and don't affect absolutely critical functions - compiler manufacturers, and the few programmers who still code in assembly language, can code around them quite happily.
Far more of a problem are unreported bugs (like the notorious floating point issues in previous processors) and unreliable processors (like ones which overheat easily and crash - trashing your work).
'Source' needs to be interpreted widely, but basically they are talking about enrolling the 'community' to contribute to the 'development' process of the patent database. If you see what I mean. It's sort of like SourceForge for commenting on patents.... The sort of thing which governments should do with their actual IT frameworks (and much else).
...the Economist article also includes a great photo of what I'd always believed to be an urban legend - students at Cambridge University, UK hoisting a car onto the roof of the most important building in the University, which is also (a) quite historic and (b) in the middle of the City. They, of course, did it without damaging the building or the car; and in vastly less time than it took the authorities to remove. Like the students mentioned at MIT, they were duly praised by their masters for work well done.
The other Cambridge corker I know of was in the early days of students using word processors to do their final dissertations. Just hours before the dissertations were due in; one student did "search and replace" on someone else's dissertation - changing every instance of "the " to "the f**king ". When the diligent dissertation writer sat down to print his work... [of course, easily undone with another search and replace - but the distress in the mean time was awesome]
Someone mentions the ZX Spectrum. For non-Britishers, or those under 30, this was an ingenius £100 home computer of the early 80s. It was particularly famouse for having 40 rubber keys and two (as I recall) shift keys (symbol shift and cap shift) and a context-sensitive sort-of-auto-shift-mode which meant keys would generate whole words when it expected you to enter a command/programming keyword. Some keys did indeed have, I think, up to 5 different functions
It was impossible to touch type; more a sort of rubbery squish - but it was surprisingly easy to get good speed with the two shifts, once you;d got used to the modes. I think the 53-keyer may be great; but there's no need to make adaptation harder by going for alpha layout. The world is so familiar with qwerty (or azerty, or..) that anything else really is asking for trouble. Fewer keys though... I'm all up for it...
Slashdot Mirror
This is yet another one-trick pony. Basically, a few years ago, desperate investors, not yet burnt enough by the dotcom boom, realised they should be backing "mobile" ventures. Anything would do, as long as it was "mobile".
Note that these guys charge £100 / year ($220). Given that the average mobile would cost £200 to replace (tops, brand new) and you get a free one every year or two with a contract - they are suggesting you pay an insurance premium of c. 50% of the phone value, for a phone which you'll probably be getting rid of soon - and which the networks will disable if you report stolen. Oh yeah, and you don't actually get the phone back, it just screams.
To be fair - the real benefit is that it backs up the data on the phone; but if you're sensitive enough to spend £100/yr on this service, you ought to find a better way. The fact that this is "Home Office and Police backed" just goes to show how readily these agencies piss our money on pointlessness.
Bill Gates - genuinely philanthropic - his ego might like the fact that he is the man that's saving the world, but at least he's saving other people.
The paypal guy has just looked in the mirror, realised he's getting older, and wants to live longer. He's worked out that if a few days' coding, some neat financial agreements and a bit of luck can make hundreds of millions of dollars; perhaps a few million dollars and some injecting of mice can lead to him living forever. The guy is more Frankenstien than philanthropist.
Job done.
Thank goodness Slashdot's there to help publicise not only ground breaking new books, but even new editions. I really wouldn't want to miss the opportunity to discover why I need to buy book v2.0.
Does anyone remember when Slashdot wasn't quite so heavily infected by the insideous PR virus?
50,000 jobs at, say, $60,000 each = $3bn. That's $3bn on top of license fees. That's $3bn just to do what you can do already. That's not good. Of course, moving to Linux is hardly cheap on support, but there's no license fee. Seems to me that this would be an ideal time to switch (not that big companies will). Still - it's hilarious that papers will carry this sort of PR puffery from Microsoft without question.
The UK's issue is that our government is obsessed with passing new laws to be seen to be doing something. Pretty much everything that matters is already a crime, but there's a general incompetence and mind-boggling bureacracy in our criminal justice system which renders most laws meaningless (people commit them, often repeatedly and openly).
An example - I was a witness in a court case and things were falling apart through multiple failures. I asked "who's in charge here?" And noone knew. Not the police, not the lawyers, certainly not the administrators, clerks and officials. It took four dates over a year and a half to heaqr a case of very very minor assualt (I was the victim. Believe me, it was minor).
The government's answer is just to keep passing more laws, and enforcing them on the basis of ease of prosecution rather than importance (speed cameras abound, as do parking wardens. Not too many police officers in sight, but plenty of thugs and robbers). I guess that much violent porn would be downloaded on p2p - so the cops can just use simple bots to hunt out the newly-defined miscreants. Leave this country now.
Let's all learn unicode binary and we will all be happy with just 2 keys. Imagine the efficiency! I've been doing it for some time now. Who needs 108 pesky keys. Or should I say 01001100011001010111010000100111011100110010000001 100001011011000110110000100000
01101100011001010110000101110010011011100010000001 110101011011100110100101100011
01101111011001000110010100100000011000100110100101 101110011000010111001001111001
00100000011000010110111001100100001000000111011101 100101001000000111011101101001
01101100011011000010000001100001011011000110110000 100000011000100110010100100000
01101000011000010111000001110000011110010010000001 110111011010010111010001101000
00100000011010100111010101110011011101000010000000 110010001000000110101101100101
01111001011100110010111000100000010010010110110101 100001011001110110100101101110
01100101001000000111010001101000011001010010000001 100101011001100110011001101001
01100011011010010110010101101110011000110111100100 100001001000000100100100100111
01110110011001010010000001100010011001010110010101 101110001000000110010001101111
01101001011011100110011100100000011010010111010000 100000011001100110111101110010
00100000011100110110111101101101011001010010000001 110100011010010110110101100101
00100000011011100110111101110111001011100010000001 010111011010000110111100100000
01101110011001010110010101100100011100110010000000 110001001100000011100000100000
01110000011001010111001101101011011110010010000001 101011011001010111100101110011
00101110?
In plusnet's explanation of the problem at http://bbs.adslguide.org.uk/showthreaded.php?Cat=& Board=plusnet&Number=2600008 is a little sign that plusnet have not been quite as customer caring as they should be...
"... So, here we are, it is almost a month since the 700GB of email and mailing lists were lost and we still have no recovered data to return to you. This is of course upsetting for us, and even more so for the customers whose data has been affected. The longer we wait for the equipment to be returned to us the greater the risk we run of hitting other capacity issues that we know are ahead of us, and we do not feel that we can justify any longer a wait, and still be taking the appropriate action for our customers... "
If I had deleted 700 GB of customer email, I'd keep trying to recover it and buy replacement equipment to meet the capacity needs of the business. There shouldn't need to be a trade-off. Plusnet should keep trying to recover, and buy some more kit to look after their customers.
Actually - some car-based GPS systems link up to the car's other sensors (accelerometer, speed, steering, parking radar, etc). While they're not accurate for any long distance, they're perfectly good for a short distance (maybe a few hundred metres) and the software in the system can use this info in the temporary absence of a GPS signal.
Technologies used are irrelevant, from a business point of view (don't flame that) - it's all about market share. Google are running away with the search market - and with it, the future of advertising. New entrants have no chance, so the only competition is going to come from the existing players getting their act together. Both yahoo and MS have embedded user bases which will erode unless they can get to a par with google. If this means rewriting some code base, or MS having to rely on oss for a while, so be it. If they don't rapidly tackle google, they'll lose a lot of $$ in the medium term, and lose their business in the long term. Of course - one day the US Govt could break google up (Bell style) but they've never done that with MS, so MS really do have to win the web war to survive and at the moment they're being pulped by google. Yahoo may offer a shortcut to victory (or at least a more even fight).
I'd much rather entrepreneurial organisations like google do this than Governments doing it themselves.
As ever - the British Government wasted millions of pounds on a poorly thought through and badly implemented project to bring all of e-government together - direct.gov.uk.
Specifically to the google point; some British techs came up with the rather cheaper www.directionlessgov.com - which compares google results when you search for government terms to the results from direct.gov.uk. Unsurprisingly - google turns out to be rather more effective than the government.
The real outcome of this was a massive transfer of money from other countries to the UK, rather than true realisation of the value of 3G. As first mover, the UK was fiercely competed over by the companies, in a superbly devised auction. Other countries quickly tried to copy - but after a couple more countries, the global mobile phone operators realised how much money they were spending on the licenses, rather than actually building the networks. Some nations ended up giving away licenses as the telco's stopped paying for the licenses. Effectively cross-subsidising from other countries to the UK. In fact, it has been calculated that if the mobile companies are ever to cover their costs for the UK licenses that they'll need ARPU of £600 per year. Even at present costs, that's a lot of World Cup snippets.
The big lesson is that forcing companies to overcompete for spectrum by creating scarcity through regulation may well be an apparently attractive short-term solution, especially to tax-hungry Europe, but has major long-term downsides.
The BBC site says that the raid was carried out by 50 police officers. In one way, it's good to know that Britain's not the only country which mismanages its police resources so badly, but it still seems hugely disproportionate (techy types not known for their violent resistance tactics). Presumably, the operation would have been just as effective (and arguably, just as wrong) with a couple of officers, a couple of techy coppers, and a couple of big blokes to hump off the servers. It does send out a signal about the recording industry's perverse hold on the authorities. I'd love to the monopolies commission going to the HQ of a big record company with 50 officers to seize a few price-fixing files. Somehow I think it won't happen.
The terrifying thought is that our gullible leaders will be sold this concept by Microsoft. I can just hear the Home Office justifying buying 100,000 pay as you go PCs as being a lower initial outlay followed by predictable payments and insurance against upgrades (that's upgrades from the monopolistic supplier, Microsoft who's leasing it to them).
Just imagine - the UK government buys 100,000 top end PC's for £1000 each and then pays £1000 over 3 years for each copy of Windows... not possible? I wish.
Basically - MS acquired Giant and started offering free Spyware within XP SP2. I'm sure these guys would have liked to have been acquired by MS - they might even have been in the running. No chance of a trade sale now - they've taken too much funding to provide backers with an attractive exit, and now they're stuck with having to fight against a product which will not only be free, but be part of the operating system which really needs it. Other than Firefox (which is also free), how many pieces of software have ever beaten that combination in the mass market? Given that it's impossible for most people to determine which is the better anti spyware product, the CEO's claim that people will choose a superior solution is pretty weak. Their options now are pretty rapidly to widen the offering (in which case the CEO's claim is pointless) or to provide a niche service to businesses (which is fine). The lesson? You can occasionally make money by offering a single software solution, but if you're betting your shirt - back a company that has more than omne product.
How accurate is the Mac's motion detection? Does this mean I should trade in my PC, stick a Mac in my rucksack, and let it work out how many calories I burn cycling to work?
Clearly you're not in America - or you'd be looking for miles per hour. Or inches per week. Or feet per day. Actually, I'm in Britain and we're just as bad. Sorry.
In London, we now pay for access to the roads. If I want to drive into Central London I have to pay for 'bandwidth' in the congested area [if I use low bandwidth access, like a motorcycle, I don't pay]. This is directly analogous to the fact that I pay for my broadband access at home. [some commentators might discuss other road charges, such as road tax and petrol tax too] The idea of service providers paying the ISP's for preferential access to customers is a bit like charging shops for my car usage. It would be like having a toll booth at the entry points to the City, asking me where I'll be shopping, then charging the shops for my access [potentially allowing me to go on faster roads if I'm visiting high paying shops]. At the very periphery of the real world this might just work [a shop are so keen for your custom that they will send a limo to collect you] but if this policy were applied wholesale, it'd lead to the death of the City's commercial centre. The logistics are simpler in the case of the internet, but the principle applies. Economic dynamism is achieved by having plenty of vendors vying for business. Economies which restrict this stagnate. The internet will stagnate if middlemen [ISP's] try to choose which sites we can visit [they may profit, but the consumer will not]. As ISP's enjoy a degree of natural monopoly, it behoves governments to prevent this potential abuse.
One of the greatest drivers of economic development across Africa is the mobile phone. It's done more for development than almost any number of international agencies. The mobile phone has enabled people to find out what's happening in other parts of their country, or other parts of the world, without having to go there. It enables farmers to find out what prices are in markets, or traders to find stock. It's even allowed millions of kids to set up their own telecoms businesses, with phone booths providing affordable calls to local people. Affordable computers will enable similar progress. Not everyone needs one - although you'll be surprised how many people will be able to scrimp, save and trade. But many communities will, in one way or another, get one. Typical ingenuity will enable people to do all kinds of things we won't anticipate. Allowing them the freedom to share, innovate, discover and get entrepreneurial will drive incomes up and improve democracy. So much better than the usual well-meaning but ineffectual direct attempts to improve lives in developing countries.
To be fair - the Comet was revolutionary in many ways - especially being the first commercial jet airliner. The metal fatigue which caused it to crash was not known about until the crashes. First mover disadvantage. Because the British investigated the crashes so thoroughly, subsequent airliners could ensure they weren't prone to the issue. A great shame that DeHavilland did all the work and a bunch of people died for Boeing to benefit.
Seriously. What I find amusing here is the collection of comments about "stupid kid" and similar. No way. This guy knew what he was doing; he thought it would be quite funny to see what happened - and he was rewarded with years of amusing misdirected messages followed by a flurry of activity on the web. Well done him. Years ago - a secretary in my office "was shocked" to discover that British Airways voicemail could be broken into by using # followed by the PIN 4444 when prompted for options 1-n. The SUN newspaper in the UK carried the story prominently - after we changed the messages. This was brilliant. Just what she was hoping for when she type '#4444'. And similarly - he's got just what he was hoping for. Just think about the email admins in charge of testing.com, test.com and 123.com. They must have a field day.
Processor bugs have been around as long as processors. For example, I remember on the Z80, Zilog didn't particularly confess to the bugs - they just didn't list the affected instructions in the documentation. By looking at the byte codes, programmers were able to spot where an instruction be. Upon trying it - usually, you'd find that it largely did what it should but with a few unexpected behaviours. Once understood - you could pretty happily deploy them, with the caveat that Zilog might change the processor and render them unuseable. If memory serves me right, 'unofficial' instructions constituted 5-10% of the instruction set.
In he case of bugs in modern processors - as long as they are published, fully understood, and don't affect absolutely critical functions - compiler manufacturers, and the few programmers who still code in assembly language, can code around them quite happily.
Far more of a problem are unreported bugs (like the notorious floating point issues in previous processors) and unreliable processors (like ones which overheat easily and crash - trashing your work).
'Source' needs to be interpreted widely, but basically they are talking about enrolling the 'community' to contribute to the 'development' process of the patent database. If you see what I mean. It's sort of like SourceForge for commenting on patents.... The sort of thing which governments should do with their actual IT frameworks (and much else).
...the Economist article also includes a great photo of what I'd always believed to be an urban legend - students at Cambridge University, UK hoisting a car onto the roof of the most important building in the University, which is also (a) quite historic and (b) in the middle of the City. They, of course, did it without damaging the building or the car; and in vastly less time than it took the authorities to remove. Like the students mentioned at MIT, they were duly praised by their masters for work well done. The other Cambridge corker I know of was in the early days of students using word processors to do their final dissertations. Just hours before the dissertations were due in; one student did "search and replace" on someone else's dissertation - changing every instance of "the " to "the f**king ". When the diligent dissertation writer sat down to print his work... [of course, easily undone with another search and replace - but the distress in the mean time was awesome]
Someone mentions the ZX Spectrum. For non-Britishers, or those under 30, this was an ingenius £100 home computer of the early 80s. It was particularly famouse for having 40 rubber keys and two (as I recall) shift keys (symbol shift and cap shift) and a context-sensitive sort-of-auto-shift-mode which meant keys would generate whole words when it expected you to enter a command/programming keyword. Some keys did indeed have, I think, up to 5 different functions It was impossible to touch type; more a sort of rubbery squish - but it was surprisingly easy to get good speed with the two shifts, once you;d got used to the modes. I think the 53-keyer may be great; but there's no need to make adaptation harder by going for alpha layout. The world is so familiar with qwerty (or azerty, or..) that anything else really is asking for trouble. Fewer keys though... I'm all up for it...