Actually, you are half right. Vista x32 does support a limited form of PAE. For a motherboard that supports PAE it will however allow up to 4 GB, not more. Note though that the support is pretty shaky - the Vista support forums are full of people complaining that PAE doesn't work with a number of mobos that are supposed to support it.
In the case of the more common 32 bit version of Vista, you'll never get 4 GB of usable memory. The reason is that all the devices in the system need allocatable addresses which can only go as high as 32 bits so they occupy the address space that would otherwise be available for the RAM. Modern graphic cards also swallow a fair bit of address space. The end result is that you'll only get about 3 GB usable memory of the 4 GB physical memory.
If you are using Vista x32, do *not* buy more than 3 GB of memory or you will be just throwing your money away.
This proposal is like many other similar ones a red herring. The article shows that the NYT doesn't understand EU politics.
You see, when you have 27 member states that have a veto right on nearly everything the name of the game is haggling and compromise. It works like this: Member state A wants X that member state B is reluctant to agree upon. A then rallies member state C and D to put forward a preposterous proposal Y that shocks member states A, E, F and G. Then the negotiations begin and imagine that, member state A is willing to give up Y if it gets X. B is now under pressure from A, C, D, E, F and G to agree to X.
This is more likely a play for reducing fishing quotas or something similar. It is important to remember that the stated proposals are seldom what they seem to be and are always preposterous. Even if a proposed bill is vaguely on-topic, it starts with an extreme suggestion in order to allow a compromise solution. It's just the way it is played and it actually works very well.
The down side is of course that people not familiar with how things work in Brussels tend to get upset over the first batch of radical proposals.
What is just briefly mentioned in the article is that conspiracy to make a DOS attack will be punishable. It seems like a very vaguely defined crime and because the tough sentences it would give the police search warrants way too easily. Technically to be a suspect all you need to have is a computer - what else kind of evidence could there be before an attack is actually committed?
The Fermi paradox relies on the assumption that alien civilization are using electromagnetic waves for communication. This is an unjustified assumption as EM waves may not at all be the best choice. Just because we don't currently have anything better doesn't mean that there is nothing better.
The speed of light limitation is an obvious example of radio waves not being the best imaginable medium for interstellar communications. Special relativity and all that is our current model of the limits of information propagation but given our history it would be presumptuous that no replacement model will come along in due time.
The Fermi paradox goes something like this:
Indian #1: We use smoke signals for communication - it's the best thing we can think of.
Indian #2: Right.
Indian #1: It is reasonable to assume that other people would use the same technology.
Indian #2: Right.
Indian #1: We have not observed any smoke signals from the neighbouring mountains. If there were a lot of other people in the world, we'd be seeing smoke signals all over the place.
Indian #2: Ergo there are not a lot of other people in the world.
Indian #1: Right.
The abolitionists and quakers cherry picked what they liked. The bible however is if read literally pretty clear on slavery. And Jesus, this supposedly perfect moral role model, never once spoke up against it. It doesn't mean that the bible is an evil book - just a very outdated one that has little relevance today. The science and ethics that is proposed in it is a product of its time. Today it holds a cultural and historical value but nothing more.
Huh. I wonder if you could still derive value from it by taking the whole darn thing metaphorically.
Ok, so we shouldn't take the golden rule ("Do to others as you would have them do to you.") literally? And what values do you suggest we derive from the instructions of stoning apostates, homosexuals, adulturers, people that work on the sabbath etc?
Run Christianity in a thought-experiment sandbox. The principles are pretty sound.
Which principles? The vengeful god or the loving god? The instructions for the murder of those that don't follow the laid out rules or the instructions to forgive and forget? On what grounds do you suggest we pick the principles from what is a very inconsistent text?
Yes they have but in fact the fundamentalists are the more honest ones. The problem with non-literal interpretations of the bible is that there is absolutely no reference of which parts can be taken literally and which are supposed to be interpreted metaphorically.
Stoning your children for talking back to you impractical? Well, let's call that a metaphor. Being nice to other fellow human being sounds good? Well, let's take that one literally. The cherry picking of the good stuff (according to current moral standards) just shows how meaningless the whole thing is.
Religious moderation is in a sense a betrayal of both faith and reason. The pope chooses to accept evolution because the other position is untenable in the face of scientific evidence. Yet he claims to be certain of the virgin birth of Mary, the holy trinity and other equally nonsensical stuff.
It is not because of the bible that we have a moral society - it is despite of it. Had we been following the good book we would have still have slavery. Make no mistake, the slaveholders in the south were on the winning side of the theological argument.
So why not see it for what it is - iron age philosophy that is for the most part unsuitable for the 21st century and that doesn't contain any remarkably novel scientific or moral insights.
The article makes a great issue of price/Mbit which is perfectly silly given how broadband prices are more or less arbitrary - at least in Europe (Sweden).
I had 10 Mbit for a bunch of years and paid ~40 euros/month. I've had 100 Mbit for two years now and I'm paying slightly less.
Should you be as unfortunate as not to have fiber optics to your house (typically outside of city environments) you can be forced to suffer ADSL which typically ranges from 5-20 Mbit downstream and 1-5 mbit upstream. And guess what - you pay more than for the 100 Mbit line.
The battle of piracy laws in Sweden is far from over but there have been a number of defining decisions and events that will affect the end result.
The first major blow to the anti-piracy lobby was when the courts ruled that collecting IP addresses was a privacy violation.
The second blow was when the courts fined a guy that was engaged in sharing movies. The big point was that they didn't send him to jail. By Swedish law for a search warrant to be issued, the suspected crime must be punishable by jail. So no search warrants for copyright infringements.
The third blow was that the courts found that electronically collected evidence was not enough for a copyright infringement conviction. Hard evidence was needed (computer hardware with the violating media installed) - which was not possible to obtain because of the previous ruling.
The pirate bay spectacle has come at a huge political cost for the involved. The former minster of justice Thomas Bodström is facing hearings suspected of "ministerstyre" - as a minister putting pressure on civil servants, something excessively illegal and unconstitutional. It's major league stuff.
Furthermore the pirate bay case according to almost every legal analysis is non-existent. They didn't even have any copyrighted material on their server - just torrent links - which is not against Swedish law. So why hasn't the case been dropped? Because everybody got so scared over the political shit storm came down crashing following the raids last year. Nobody involved wants to touch it and much less admit that it was because of political pressure. So the prosecutor is pushing on with the case although it is blatantly obvious to everybody that there won't be any convictions.
If this all above makes you think that the battle is over and has been lost by the anti-pirating lobby, well, you'd be wrong. Swedish law is much less precedent based than for instance US or UK laws. The text of the law is more important than previous cases and you need a shitload of precedent before it becomes relevant. Right now we have something that amounts to anecdotal evidence. The anti-piracy lobby groups are trying to get convictions that would go against the existing precedents and it is not entirely impossible that they will succeed.
The political situation is a bit different as file sharing is really on the march in Sweden. Some 1.2 million were estimated in 2005 and 2.5 million in 2006. That's a lot for a population of 9 million. You can't make nearly a third of the population criminals and the politicians have recognized that. Through that and because of the pirate bay scandal all the Swedish major parties have expressed the wish to find some form of general solution (a tax of some sort has been suggested) for both allowing people to freely download and for the artists to get paid. While this is far from being implemented, the idea of a "war on piracy" is very dead. The anti-piracy groups will do their thing but they can't expect any political support.
As a citizen of one of the most bureaucratized and administered countries in the world (Sweden) I can tell you that standardized ID cards are extremely convenient - especially in their electronic form. Everything from banking to ordering a new passport or paying the taxes can be done with the same system.
They've now started adding biometrics to the physical ID card. Fingerprint instead of pin code. The idea is to use it when boarding an aircraft or buying groceries etc with essentially no need for human involvement.
The question however isn't if it makes life easier or not. The relevant question is if the cost associated with it is worth it. Having a permanent unique identifier attached that can be traced, well, anywhere is not a good thing if governments or corporations abuse it. It requires privacy laws and trust that the privacy laws will be respected. Ultimately it boils down to the question: do you trust the government not to screw you over and to protect you from corporate interests? My own answers are perhaps and probably. Right now there are some worrying ideas being floated by the politicians about wiretapping and Internet traffic sniffing so my first answer might change.
Still, at this point they haven't dramatically screwed up - I mean like a patriot act level of breach of trust. So right now I'm agnostic about how good this system is.
It is in fact convenient and efficient with an axiomatic foundation of trust that can be used for communication and exchange of services at many levels of society. One just has to hope that the foundation isn't rotten.
This whole iPhone discussion is mot likely to be irrelevant as they presented it way too early. I discussed this with a friend of mine that works for Sony-Ericsson and apparently both Nokia and Ericsson are capable of crunching out a new model from design to distribution in roughly 2.5 months. I'm guessing that Motorola, Samsung and the others are no worse.
If they are inclined to do so (and given the hype around the iPhone), the established phone developers can come up with something very similar and have it out earlier and at a lower cost. Nokia's Aeon concept looks like a promising candidate to build on as does the Siemens-Benq's Black Box concept. In addition, IIRC the Aeon prototype was fuel cell powered.
At least from a European and especially Japanese perspective the iPhone is already severely outdated. No 3G, no GPS etc? It's a beautiful phone, but the eye candy can be imitated and cloned and used in a better phone. Assuming that the other phone companies are complete nitwits they can easily create a more attractive package and get it out earlier and cheaper.
The biggest problem in my experience is not in the theoretical vulnerabilities of the technology but the fact that the decision makers that hand out the contracts do not have the technological know-how to give the contract to the 'right' company.
As a case in point, a few years ago in Sweden they harmonized the medical IT systems in the whole country. The politicians in charge awarded the contract to a company that offered a relatively cheap solution and that had a great marketing department. Unfortunately, they were incapable of delivering an adequate system. The huge amount of work and complete lack of proper requirement specifications led to a buggy and deeply flawed system. A quite common case is where a physician asks for the record of one patient and gets the record of somebody else. The user interface was also horrific - to register a new patient something of the order of magnitude of 100 clicks is required.
Once the problems became apparent, it was too late to do anything about it as the budget for the whole thing was already used up. Now, it is easy to blame the developer of the system - and to a large degree it is their fault - but the first cause of the problem were politicians who had no clue about neither IT nor medicine.
For high school purposes a HP48 is fabulous but it won't last you through college. Personally, I started off with an HP48GX, upgraded to a PDA running a HP simulator and a few other math apps to finally abandon the calculator approach completely. During college I had limited use for a calculator as I didn't need them on most courses (and they weren't allowed on exams) and in the instances where numerical computation was needed, real computer software packages were used - such as Matlab.
Don't take me wrong - the HP is a beautiful machine that I have very fond memories of, but for any more serious stuff it is extremely outdated and insufficient.
There may still be use for calculators for the basic stuff in high school and perhaps early college, but don't expect it to be useful for very long.
I' cant reach the new scientist site as it seems to have been/.-ed, but I'm assuming they intend to use carbon nanotubes as the new fancy material. I was unaware of them until recently, but apparently there is a good chance that nokia's phones as well as your future computer will use carbon nanotubes internally.
According to IBM and other players nanotubes are the designated successor of silicon based electronics. They already know how to mass manufacture it and they've made transistors that are 1 nm in diameter and can use a single electron for state switching. And as a bonus, if you wish to smack somebody on the head, a stick made out of nanotubes is hard to beat.
Not the same thing at all. I still have GDS installed because of its speed, but it is very primitive compared to the vista search. The latter supports far more advanced types of queries.
"Desktop search and search folders built in"
what is a search folder ?
It is a virtual directory defined not by the physical path but by a search query. I've been using vista now for about two months and the integrated search is basically why I would not want to go back to XP. While the indexing pretty much sucks and is slow to search, it is amazingly useful for file system navigation. Remember WinFS? This is almost as good - you have logical operators and an object oriented approach. It is not quite as powerful as a full relational database, but close.
Well, I'm originally an electronics engineer and that field is orders of magnitude more organized and structured than software engineering. Ultimately I ended up in software and I think that have a reasonably good view of both fields. Admittedly, I've only led groups of at most a dozen of programmers or so, but I doubt that the problems go away when you increase the number of contributors to a project. A good example of how increasingly bad things become with project complexity are the horror stories coming out from Microsoft about their Vista development (QC) troubles.
EE is intrinsically simpler because it is based primarily on physics - which offers simple, computable models. There are orders of magnitude fewer degrees of freedom. And the freedoms that exist are far more bounded.
If anything this is evidenced by the fact that most modern electronics design is actually made by computers. Human design is today at a fairly high meta-level. Software is far away from this.
As for traditional engineering being "simple" - those are your words not mine. Next time reading the text before attacking it might be a good idea.
There are two major reasons why software engineering is today not comparable to more traditional types of engineering.
The first reason is the complexity of the systems. There are essentially extremely many interacting parts that cause all sorts of emergent phenomena. This is a field that we don't really know how to handle very well - good quantitative models of complex systems simply don't exist. We need more study of systems theory and chaos theory to build some form of predictive models on which in turn can base planning.
The second problem is a sort of 'freedom of thought' culture that sees coding as the vaguely mathematical expression of ideas. As there are a huge number of degrees of freedom most attempts to regulate it in practice have been abandoned. So instead of just the problem of describing a mathematical problem, you throw individual human preferences, thinking and biases into the equation.
Of course it can't continue that way forever and we need to move to a meta level of coding. We do have well-constructed systems, such as the software on-board an airplane - but they are laughably primitive (because you have to account for all possible states the software can get in to). And we have advanced software, but it is laughably unreliable.
Still, there is reason to be hopeful. We're not inventing the wheel every time any more (just the horse carriage and so on). Modern programming systems have extensive class libraries that are on average a more stable foundation than making a custom implementation from scratch every time.
Ultimately however we need to know how to handle complex systems and how to enforce convergence/stability to systems where the huge number of possible combination of states can be analyzed. And sad as it is, if we want it to be reliable, the liberal individual approach to coding has to be abandoned in favour of a much more strict industrial way of thinking. Right now we have handcraft and we need industrial precision, standardization and quality.
As a current Vista user I can tell you the following: Microsoft has a high priority of not being blamed for security issues. Their solution is to through the UAC (User Account Control) warn the user before he makes any action that could potentially be harmful to the system. This is just about any action.
"WARNING! Operation 'use keyboard' is a high security risk. Press any key to abort."
Ok, perhaps not that bad - but nearly. If you are an experienced user, you will turn UAC off after cursing at Microsoft for 15 minutes. If you are an inexperienced user you will just blindly accept the warning - otherwise you can't use your computer normally. In effect the operating system is constantly crying wolf and there is no way in hell an inexperienced user will be able to tell the difference between an irrelevant warning and a relevant one.
Vista is also supposed to be much more secure under the hood. I really hope so, because their approach to user based security sucks. The only real point that I can see is avoiding getting sued.
Ultimately a bubble or not is irrelevant. Today investments in Internet technology are considerably higher than they were during the peak of the IT boom. A boom-bust cycle is perfectly normal for the early stages of just about any technology. Short term expectations are usually inflated but the long term impact is consistently underestimated.
Information technology is developed at an exponential pace - and we are nowhere near a saturation.
This model was considered and partially implemented in Sweden with some very bizarre effects. The story goes like this: In the 30's out of the ideas of social Darwinism and the ideas of so called "racial hygiene" came the idea that people were not criminals by choice but because of biological dispositions (even determinism). The crime/punishment model was to be abandoned for one where a group of scientist would evaluate each criminal case and determine what had to be done to "cure" the criminal and make him a functional part of society.
While it was never implemented fully, what was introduced and what we still have today is that the sentencing part includes what to do with insane people. First the case is deliberated in court and a verdict is reached. If the accused person is found guilty a psych exam is performed and a decision is made as to if the person should go to jail or be sent to a mental institution.
Perhaps you are starting to see the problem.
In order to be sentenced to mental care, you have to be guilty. Sweden holds the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that doesn't think you need to be sane to be legally responsible for your actions.
As you can imagine this brings a few problems. If you have to be guilty to receive care then a motivation for why you are guilty needs to be found - motive is essential in judicial rulings. In order to resolve this problem they invented something - I shit you not - called the "possible hypothetical motive". In essence it means that since motive is meaningless for a crazy person, the court invents a motive based on the worst case scenario. If you accidentally run over somebody with your car you will be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. If you are insane and run somebody over with your car because the little green men told you so, you will be convicted of premeditated murder.
The severity of sentence is proportional to the severity of crime. In order to get sentenced to a long time of mental care, the crime has to be really hideous. So absurdly, when the court sees that the person standing trial really needs medical help, they have to show that the crime was premeditated. So even petty crimes committed by insane people get labeled as premeditated grave atrocities. This is so that when the sentencing part of the trial comes the court can sentence them to prolonged care.
Perhaps the greatest absurdity is that the sanity of the person is first evaluated after the verdict - and hence not at the time of the crime. Temporary insanity doesn't exist. Sane criminals when convinced play insane and get sentenced to care instead of jail. Great examples of the effects of the absurdity are cases where a person commits a crime, is found insane and sentenced to care. On leave from the mental institution (yes, in Sweden both mental patients and criminals get short vacations from their sentences on a regular basis) they commit another crime. This type the psych evaluation finds them to be sane and they are sentenced to jail. So they leave from the mental institution in order to go to jail - and are returned to the mental institution once their jail sentence is up.
If you speak Swedish, read Maciej Zaremba's excellent article series on the subject, called "Rättvisan och dårarna" - it won this year's Swedish journalist prize.
The information on EU passports/ID cards is primarily supposed to be a hash code of a biometric measurement - i.e of a finger print scan.
The basic idea is automated passport controls - you swipe your passport on a reader and provide a fingerprint - if they match (and match to a record in the database) you are let through. Given a good hash algorithm obtaining the hash code should not be a too big security hole. You still need your fingerprint to get through.
A properly secure system can't rely on the payload or the algorithm being secret. If they have a good implementation then the encrypted/hashed data on the passport can be made public without any security implications. Of course some form of rolling codes would be preferable or a two way system that ensures that one you've used a code you get a new one and the old one becomes invalid.
Ultimately the fingerprint biometrics is the weak link. A biometric measurement shouldn't be possible to clone and it is, at least when used with cheap readers. If you have good enough fingerprint readers (I'm not sure that they exist) then it shouldn't be a problem.
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Actually, you are half right. Vista x32 does support a limited form of PAE. For a motherboard that supports PAE it will however allow up to 4 GB, not more. Note though that the support is pretty shaky - the Vista support forums are full of people complaining that PAE doesn't work with a number of mobos that are supposed to support it.
If you are using Vista x32, do *not* buy more than 3 GB of memory or you will be just throwing your money away.
You see, when you have 27 member states that have a veto right on nearly everything the name of the game is haggling and compromise. It works like this: Member state A wants X that member state B is reluctant to agree upon. A then rallies member state C and D to put forward a preposterous proposal Y that shocks member states A, E, F and G. Then the negotiations begin and imagine that, member state A is willing to give up Y if it gets X. B is now under pressure from A, C, D, E, F and G to agree to X.
This is more likely a play for reducing fishing quotas or something similar. It is important to remember that the stated proposals are seldom what they seem to be and are always preposterous. Even if a proposed bill is vaguely on-topic, it starts with an extreme suggestion in order to allow a compromise solution. It's just the way it is played and it actually works very well.
The down side is of course that people not familiar with how things work in Brussels tend to get upset over the first batch of radical proposals.
What is just briefly mentioned in the article is that conspiracy to make a DOS attack will be punishable. It seems like a very vaguely defined crime and because the tough sentences it would give the police search warrants way too easily. Technically to be a suspect all you need to have is a computer - what else kind of evidence could there be before an attack is actually committed?
The speed of light limitation is an obvious example of radio waves not being the best imaginable medium for interstellar communications. Special relativity and all that is our current model of the limits of information propagation but given our history it would be presumptuous that no replacement model will come along in due time.
The Fermi paradox goes something like this: Indian #1: We use smoke signals for communication - it's the best thing we can think of.
Indian #2: Right.
Indian #1: It is reasonable to assume that other people would use the same technology.
Indian #2: Right.
Indian #1: We have not observed any smoke signals from the neighbouring mountains. If there were a lot of other people in the world, we'd be seeing smoke signals all over the place.
Indian #2: Ergo there are not a lot of other people in the world.
Indian #1: Right.
The abolitionists and quakers cherry picked what they liked. The bible however is if read literally pretty clear on slavery. And Jesus, this supposedly perfect moral role model, never once spoke up against it. It doesn't mean that the bible is an evil book - just a very outdated one that has little relevance today. The science and ethics that is proposed in it is a product of its time. Today it holds a cultural and historical value but nothing more.
Stoning your children for talking back to you impractical? Well, let's call that a metaphor. Being nice to other fellow human being sounds good? Well, let's take that one literally. The cherry picking of the good stuff (according to current moral standards) just shows how meaningless the whole thing is.
Religious moderation is in a sense a betrayal of both faith and reason. The pope chooses to accept evolution because the other position is untenable in the face of scientific evidence. Yet he claims to be certain of the virgin birth of Mary, the holy trinity and other equally nonsensical stuff.
It is not because of the bible that we have a moral society - it is despite of it. Had we been following the good book we would have still have slavery. Make no mistake, the slaveholders in the south were on the winning side of the theological argument.
So why not see it for what it is - iron age philosophy that is for the most part unsuitable for the 21st century and that doesn't contain any remarkably novel scientific or moral insights.
I had 10 Mbit for a bunch of years and paid ~40 euros/month. I've had 100 Mbit for two years now and I'm paying slightly less.
Should you be as unfortunate as not to have fiber optics to your house (typically outside of city environments) you can be forced to suffer ADSL which typically ranges from 5-20 Mbit downstream and 1-5 mbit upstream. And guess what - you pay more than for the 100 Mbit line.
So price/Mbit isn't a very good metric.
The first major blow to the anti-piracy lobby was when the courts ruled that collecting IP addresses was a privacy violation.
The second blow was when the courts fined a guy that was engaged in sharing movies. The big point was that they didn't send him to jail. By Swedish law for a search warrant to be issued, the suspected crime must be punishable by jail. So no search warrants for copyright infringements.
The third blow was that the courts found that electronically collected evidence was not enough for a copyright infringement conviction. Hard evidence was needed (computer hardware with the violating media installed) - which was not possible to obtain because of the previous ruling.
The pirate bay spectacle has come at a huge political cost for the involved. The former minster of justice Thomas Bodström is facing hearings suspected of "ministerstyre" - as a minister putting pressure on civil servants, something excessively illegal and unconstitutional. It's major league stuff.
Furthermore the pirate bay case according to almost every legal analysis is non-existent. They didn't even have any copyrighted material on their server - just torrent links - which is not against Swedish law. So why hasn't the case been dropped? Because everybody got so scared over the political shit storm came down crashing following the raids last year. Nobody involved wants to touch it and much less admit that it was because of political pressure. So the prosecutor is pushing on with the case although it is blatantly obvious to everybody that there won't be any convictions.
If this all above makes you think that the battle is over and has been lost by the anti-pirating lobby, well, you'd be wrong. Swedish law is much less precedent based than for instance US or UK laws. The text of the law is more important than previous cases and you need a shitload of precedent before it becomes relevant. Right now we have something that amounts to anecdotal evidence. The anti-piracy lobby groups are trying to get convictions that would go against the existing precedents and it is not entirely impossible that they will succeed.
The political situation is a bit different as file sharing is really on the march in Sweden. Some 1.2 million were estimated in 2005 and 2.5 million in 2006. That's a lot for a population of 9 million. You can't make nearly a third of the population criminals and the politicians have recognized that. Through that and because of the pirate bay scandal all the Swedish major parties have expressed the wish to find some form of general solution (a tax of some sort has been suggested) for both allowing people to freely download and for the artists to get paid. While this is far from being implemented, the idea of a "war on piracy" is very dead. The anti-piracy groups will do their thing but they can't expect any political support.
For instance the wide spread lack of fresh water seems like a more relevant problem.
They've now started adding biometrics to the physical ID card. Fingerprint instead of pin code. The idea is to use it when boarding an aircraft or buying groceries etc with essentially no need for human involvement.
The question however isn't if it makes life easier or not. The relevant question is if the cost associated with it is worth it. Having a permanent unique identifier attached that can be traced, well, anywhere is not a good thing if governments or corporations abuse it. It requires privacy laws and trust that the privacy laws will be respected. Ultimately it boils down to the question: do you trust the government not to screw you over and to protect you from corporate interests? My own answers are perhaps and probably. Right now there are some worrying ideas being floated by the politicians about wiretapping and Internet traffic sniffing so my first answer might change.
Still, at this point they haven't dramatically screwed up - I mean like a patriot act level of breach of trust. So right now I'm agnostic about how good this system is.
It is in fact convenient and efficient with an axiomatic foundation of trust that can be used for communication and exchange of services at many levels of society. One just has to hope that the foundation isn't rotten.
If they are inclined to do so (and given the hype around the iPhone), the established phone developers can come up with something very similar and have it out earlier and at a lower cost. Nokia's Aeon concept looks like a promising candidate to build on as does the Siemens-Benq's Black Box concept. In addition, IIRC the Aeon prototype was fuel cell powered.
At least from a European and especially Japanese perspective the iPhone is already severely outdated. No 3G, no GPS etc? It's a beautiful phone, but the eye candy can be imitated and cloned and used in a better phone. Assuming that the other phone companies are complete nitwits they can easily create a more attractive package and get it out earlier and cheaper.
As a case in point, a few years ago in Sweden they harmonized the medical IT systems in the whole country. The politicians in charge awarded the contract to a company that offered a relatively cheap solution and that had a great marketing department. Unfortunately, they were incapable of delivering an adequate system. The huge amount of work and complete lack of proper requirement specifications led to a buggy and deeply flawed system. A quite common case is where a physician asks for the record of one patient and gets the record of somebody else. The user interface was also horrific - to register a new patient something of the order of magnitude of 100 clicks is required.
Once the problems became apparent, it was too late to do anything about it as the budget for the whole thing was already used up. Now, it is easy to blame the developer of the system - and to a large degree it is their fault - but the first cause of the problem were politicians who had no clue about neither IT nor medicine.
Don't take me wrong - the HP is a beautiful machine that I have very fond memories of, but for any more serious stuff it is extremely outdated and insufficient.
There may still be use for calculators for the basic stuff in high school and perhaps early college, but don't expect it to be useful for very long.
According to IBM and other players nanotubes are the designated successor of silicon based electronics. They already know how to mass manufacture it and they've made transistors that are 1 nm in diameter and can use a single electron for state switching. And as a bonus, if you wish to smack somebody on the head, a stick made out of nanotubes is hard to beat.
Not the same thing at all. I still have GDS installed because of its speed, but it is very primitive compared to the vista search. The latter supports far more advanced types of queries.
EE is intrinsically simpler because it is based primarily on physics - which offers simple, computable models. There are orders of magnitude fewer degrees of freedom. And the freedoms that exist are far more bounded.
If anything this is evidenced by the fact that most modern electronics design is actually made by computers. Human design is today at a fairly high meta-level. Software is far away from this.
As for traditional engineering being "simple" - those are your words not mine. Next time reading the text before attacking it might be a good idea.
The first reason is the complexity of the systems. There are essentially extremely many interacting parts that cause all sorts of emergent phenomena. This is a field that we don't really know how to handle very well - good quantitative models of complex systems simply don't exist. We need more study of systems theory and chaos theory to build some form of predictive models on which in turn can base planning.
The second problem is a sort of 'freedom of thought' culture that sees coding as the vaguely mathematical expression of ideas. As there are a huge number of degrees of freedom most attempts to regulate it in practice have been abandoned. So instead of just the problem of describing a mathematical problem, you throw individual human preferences, thinking and biases into the equation.
Of course it can't continue that way forever and we need to move to a meta level of coding. We do have well-constructed systems, such as the software on-board an airplane - but they are laughably primitive (because you have to account for all possible states the software can get in to). And we have advanced software, but it is laughably unreliable.
Still, there is reason to be hopeful. We're not inventing the wheel every time any more (just the horse carriage and so on). Modern programming systems have extensive class libraries that are on average a more stable foundation than making a custom implementation from scratch every time.
Ultimately however we need to know how to handle complex systems and how to enforce convergence/stability to systems where the huge number of possible combination of states can be analyzed. And sad as it is, if we want it to be reliable, the liberal individual approach to coding has to be abandoned in favour of a much more strict industrial way of thinking. Right now we have handcraft and we need industrial precision, standardization and quality.
As a current Vista user I can tell you the following: Microsoft has a high priority of not being blamed for security issues. Their solution is to through the UAC (User Account Control) warn the user before he makes any action that could potentially be harmful to the system. This is just about any action. "WARNING! Operation 'use keyboard' is a high security risk. Press any key to abort." Ok, perhaps not that bad - but nearly. If you are an experienced user, you will turn UAC off after cursing at Microsoft for 15 minutes. If you are an inexperienced user you will just blindly accept the warning - otherwise you can't use your computer normally. In effect the operating system is constantly crying wolf and there is no way in hell an inexperienced user will be able to tell the difference between an irrelevant warning and a relevant one. Vista is also supposed to be much more secure under the hood. I really hope so, because their approach to user based security sucks. The only real point that I can see is avoiding getting sued.
Information technology is developed at an exponential pace - and we are nowhere near a saturation.
While it was never implemented fully, what was introduced and what we still have today is that the sentencing part includes what to do with insane people. First the case is deliberated in court and a verdict is reached. If the accused person is found guilty a psych exam is performed and a decision is made as to if the person should go to jail or be sent to a mental institution.
Perhaps you are starting to see the problem.
In order to be sentenced to mental care, you have to be guilty. Sweden holds the dubious distinction of being the only country in the world that doesn't think you need to be sane to be legally responsible for your actions.
As you can imagine this brings a few problems. If you have to be guilty to receive care then a motivation for why you are guilty needs to be found - motive is essential in judicial rulings. In order to resolve this problem they invented something - I shit you not - called the "possible hypothetical motive". In essence it means that since motive is meaningless for a crazy person, the court invents a motive based on the worst case scenario. If you accidentally run over somebody with your car you will be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. If you are insane and run somebody over with your car because the little green men told you so, you will be convicted of premeditated murder.
The severity of sentence is proportional to the severity of crime. In order to get sentenced to a long time of mental care, the crime has to be really hideous. So absurdly, when the court sees that the person standing trial really needs medical help, they have to show that the crime was premeditated. So even petty crimes committed by insane people get labeled as premeditated grave atrocities. This is so that when the sentencing part of the trial comes the court can sentence them to prolonged care.
Perhaps the greatest absurdity is that the sanity of the person is first evaluated after the verdict - and hence not at the time of the crime. Temporary insanity doesn't exist. Sane criminals when convinced play insane and get sentenced to care instead of jail. Great examples of the effects of the absurdity are cases where a person commits a crime, is found insane and sentenced to care. On leave from the mental institution (yes, in Sweden both mental patients and criminals get short vacations from their sentences on a regular basis) they commit another crime. This type the psych evaluation finds them to be sane and they are sentenced to jail. So they leave from the mental institution in order to go to jail - and are returned to the mental institution once their jail sentence is up. If you speak Swedish, read Maciej Zaremba's excellent article series on the subject, called "Rättvisan och dårarna" - it won this year's Swedish journalist prize.
The basic idea is automated passport controls - you swipe your passport on a reader and provide a fingerprint - if they match (and match to a record in the database) you are let through. Given a good hash algorithm obtaining the hash code should not be a too big security hole. You still need your fingerprint to get through.
A properly secure system can't rely on the payload or the algorithm being secret. If they have a good implementation then the encrypted/hashed data on the passport can be made public without any security implications. Of course some form of rolling codes would be preferable or a two way system that ensures that one you've used a code you get a new one and the old one becomes invalid.
Ultimately the fingerprint biometrics is the weak link. A biometric measurement shouldn't be possible to clone and it is, at least when used with cheap readers. If you have good enough fingerprint readers (I'm not sure that they exist) then it shouldn't be a problem.