Well, the internet probably does need more bandwidth to support Netflix.
And I'm not a fan of QoS to get better streaming video either. But is Cerf giving up on fixing the problems with streaming (and any realtime internet work) that we know about, bufferbloat? I heard about that from Jim Gettys (thanks to a tweet from John Carmack). Here's a two-page intro in IEEE magazine or a (more interesting IMHO) PDF slide presentation with nice graphs and there is other advice and documents and code on that bufferbloat website.
See, the problem with streaming isn't just bandwidth, it's latency, and the variability thereof. We always measure and marketers talk about bandwidth, but only rarely if ever about latency. Thus ISPs don't optimize for it as a rule. The result? You get these occassional 6-second lags and other phenomena and little economic incentive to track them or fix them. (And certain data ISPs are at least mildly incented to look the other way since it protects their VOIP/PSTN revenues).
How about ISPs actually implement ECN to deal with it? How about router manufacturers design for this (or we all switch to OpenWRT?) How about we techies develop tools to help consumers monitor line quality latency (ping times) over time? How about consumers actually learn to care about latency or we educate them? It's not "too complicated" for consumers to understand; consumers can differentiate between velocity ("what's your car's fastest speed?") and acceleration ("how quickly can it go from 0 to 60?") so I'm sure we could get them to understand bandwidth versus latency. It's just not well measured/monitored right now. (I think we need a better phrase/metric that captures the notion of latency like the "0 to 60" one for cars.)
If you want to help develop measures of latency, use Bismark (or vote for it in the FCC open apps competition) or come up with an open source ping-until-quit tool that logs timestamps for long time periods and displays the results graphically and/or competitively. Better yet, make a phone app that does this and hooks it to google/whoever's maps and shares the data so fellow consumers can see which areas of the phone company networks really suck. (I'm open to hearing about other tools. I used to use a freeware one but it went payware and the best tools I know of are DSLReports's SmokePing and their other tools.)
100x greater bandwidth may make recorded video faster, but it won't solve core problems with realtime (streaming or video conferencing) video faster, nor web conferencing, nor necessarily online gaming. I sure as hell don't want the internet's quality to become as lousy as cell phones and that's what'll happen over time if we don't keep ISPs we pay the big bucks to focused on fixing the problems.
As I read it, broadly the UK system enumerates a (restricted, fixed) set of allowed exceptions, while the US system allows any use conceivably to be "fair" pursuant to a set of factors (that are in practice defined by the court as-needed.)
Apparently the UK system doesn't explicitly allow "parody" which is one reason this comes up (as sort of referenced in the BBC article).
But I suspect the UK copyright minister isn't really interested in promoting "parody"; it's more about trying not to strangle the next Google from being invented in the UK. Ask yourself the broader business/economic question like "Google has taken such liberties with copyright fair use in their business model... man that worked out well... why couldn't Google have been invented in the UK? Oh yeah, the copyright system is really picky about what is/isn't allowed and this is anti-innovation; maybe we should legislate by liberty-allowing priority/tests than explictly enumerating consumers' rights and let the courts sort it out".
I've now looked at the Microsoft patent. While I don't know the specifics of the SGI O2 implementation, I doubt they were "processing each of the copies of the frame in parallel, using a different channel of the multiple channels of the GPU" as described in Claim 1. However, IANAL (or should I say IANAPA...)
The claims seem to revolve around handling certain parts of video encoding in a GPU vs certain parts in the CPU but the site is slashdotted so I can't review it at the moment.
All that said, if I were looking for prior art, I would look at SGI patents for SGI's Indigo IMPACT and/or IMPACT Compression board hardware (e.g. see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/SGI_Indigo2) and even better, the slightly later "O2" workstation graphics they implemented in 1997 (see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/SGI_O2 ). The IMPACT graphics video handling was done all in hardware off the CPU as far as I know, but the O2 had a unified memory architecture and integrated graphics in such a way that some video texture operations were handled on the graphics chipset (the MJPEG compression?) and some in the CPU (texture storage in general purpose RAM). Whether this split of CPU/GPU operations matches the claims MS is patenting, I don't know and would welcome informed comment.
(More broadly, I would add that I thought PCs were doing video decoding on the GPU as far back as Nvidia's Riva TNT if not the slightly earlier Riva 128 (1998). Don't know any implementation specifics tho.)
If cars drive themselves, google's blog claims this could reduce greenhouse emissions.
This seems wishful thinking at best or greenwashing at worst... autonomous cars will be a disaster that will increase greenhouse gasses substantially.
Why? 1) because now more people can afford, in terms of their time, to drive further for work. So they will. And 2) if transportation of raw materials is cheaper because drivers aren't needed, the volume of material transported will go up, assuming the demand for goods is somewhat elastic with the price. With the amount of material transported increasing, the gasoline required for that transport and thus the carbon emitted will increase.
Color me a pessimist. Autonomous cars will be great for human freedom, and for human safety, but reduced greenhouse emissions is one thing that will not be a benefit.
Now if Google could build us some nice carpool-sharing app hooked to Google directions, with a reputation engine for the fellow passengers (perhaps in conjunction with their autonomous car work) to avoid unpleasant passenger surprises, *that* I could see helping reduce greenhouse emissions.
Actually none of my comments were meant to discuss re-using a one-time pad. I'm not sure which of my comments you're referring to, but perhaps you are thinking of my comment about splitting a 1TB one-time pad into 10 components, each for use with one of 10 different parties. That's not re-use. Otherwise, I completely agree with your comments that using a one-time pad multiple times is, by definition, no longer a one-time pad and has much different security properties.
I've been thinking this same thing (using USB keys for a OTP, and "why don't we do that?") for a couple years now, but 10 minutes after reading your post, the following problems/"considerations" with the USB OTP approach did start to enter my mind:
1) I can see that with a big 2TB pad, you'd also want/need to cycle through pads... the longer you keep the same pad without destroying it, the more data an attacker can get with rubber-hose cryptography if they recover your pad... by coming to your(or his/her) house with a gun and ripping the USB key off your neck. Or seizing it when you/they travel.
2) Also, the other trouble I can forsee with OTPs is that you need one of them for each person you need to communicate with securely. Typically if you are doing something needing this security, you are not doing it with just one other person... you also need to communicate with multiple parties. Once you have 5-10 parties to communicate securely with, the OTP can get a little cumbersome. Carrying around 5-10 USB keys and keeping them straight? And I can't envision it working with 200+ counterparties (a USB-OTP-for-the-web scenario). If you partition your 1TB USB into, say, 10 parts, one for each counterparty, you still have problems. You still need to get 1/10th of that USB key to each of the other parties without giving them the other 9/10ths of the key. (Or your whole gang could use a set of the same 1TB keys and you are trading off convenience versus chances of an informant/leaker, and if you're paranoid enough to be using 1TB OTP, why make that tradeoff?) And don't the counterparties need to communicate so they need their own web of keys?
3) There is the little problem of USB-PC security: wouldn't putting the USB key in a PC expose your whole OTP to the perhaps-infected PC? How does this actually work?
One can see that subversion-resistant secure random number generation, secure transport, and secure key usage, and secure key destruction are all required to make OTPs actually secure.
I predict someone will attempt to market USB one-time pads within 5 years as a sort of snake-oil bandaid, and I can see a distant future where they get used, but I don't see them becoming used widely/securely particularly soon. (Disclaimer: bank tokens that give you 5-digit codes for authenticating transactions do make a lot more sense to me however and might be one targetted use of this technology.)
--LP
P.S. I have not read the security literature on one-time pads. Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious. P.P.S. I was kind of stunned last week though when getting a mini-SD card for my phone that I can, for $50, get something that is literally the width/length/thickness of my pinkie fingernail that contains 8GB.
Well, I tend to cynicism myself at times. But as a web programmer who doesn't desire to upgrade anything, the changes from HTML 4 to HTML 5 look like a nice batch of improvements. It looks like 85+% good stuff, and there is a decent handful of things that I wish we'd had ages ago and I'm bummed I can't start using today.
1) But nobody seems to have mentioned filtered DSL providers which might be a helpful option. You don't have to secure your PC to get filtered Internet.
I have a friend who gets filtered DSL Internet from a company called Integrity Online and that's worked well for him. There is also a list of other filtered Internet companies at: http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Access_Providers/Filtered/. Basically these are ISPs who manage the proxy filters for you, which is more secure than doing it on your PC. (I dunno what you do if you want Cable or a particular ISP; contact the ISP for info then.)
Still, don't expect anyone's filters to be bullet-proof against a curious teen.
2) For someone going down this route, I would definitely strongly consider monitoring solutions in addition or as an alternative to filtering. Others have mentioned this, but it's worth understanding why monitoring is worth doing.
With filtering solutions, the filter company has to ensure they don't block innocuous content, like a NYTimes story that mentions sex. They have to have a low false-positive rate or they get complaints, extra work and dissatisfied customers. A good filter has to have human-review in the loop to avoid false positives, or automated content checks that are either too-strict or too-loose. And the achilles heel of human review is that it's always out of date.
But a monitoring system can have a much higher false-positive rate than a filter and still be effective. In other words, because monitoring systems don't block access like filters, they can cast a wider net and catch more objectionable material without becoming annoying/unworkable/circumvented-unknowingly. Also, the person being watched has no idea whether they are visiting material defined as objectionable so they tend to self-censor and it's much harder to skirt the boundaries of what gets you busted when you don't know what it is. Filters always leave you with an exact knowledge of "that passed, that failed" the filter.
For example, if the monitor just flags every URL that displays the word "sex" in the HTML (or IM message or filename) for example, for filtering this would be unacceptable when blocking, but with monitoring, you as a parent you can kinda just take a look at the list of flagged URLs and gauge if the URLs look like something you care about. Random news sites with the word... no big deal. Porn sites and experimentation to avoid the filter and/or monitor stand out much more easily though.
There's a free monitoring app you can put on your PC that emails to whoever is specified a 'suspicious visited URLs' list every couple weeks called X3watch. I don't know how how good/weak it is from a security standpoint but it flags way more than filters I've seen.
(Note that monitors don't necessarily catch every kind of traffic, nor do they necessarily tell you who was messing with the PC on a particular time/date.)
3) The kid can of course always visit an unfiltered PC/wifi-cell-phone at a library/school/internet-cafe/friend's house, or get DVDs/CDs/magazines from a friend, etc. At the end of the day the parent has to help them understand why they're choosing to restrict them and help them to make the same choices they are enforcing/recommending.
An interesting possible reason for 365's outage debacle was posted by someone on an O'Reilly Radar blog (emphasis added by me):
ajblardone [07.24.07 06:22 PM]
I was there when the power went out. The generators kicked in right away. Some colos were fine others weren't. Mine went black for a while after the outage. 365 main had been working on electrical upgrades all week and this outage might have been bad timing for them... At 4pm 365 main sent out a notice saying the building was 100% operational and still running on the generators until PG&E confirms that utility power is stable.
As a merchant, I found myself treading the same path as jjeffers, initially notifying card companies and card owners and now just deleting the orders.
The card companies have structured the system so that liability rests with the merchants.
In part, this is smart because merchants will always have the best 'hinkiness' detectors at the point of the transaction. But it also means that the incentives for system-wide changes by the credit card vendors are weak.
There is certainly is room for improvement. I always thought it'd be cool for merchants to band together to share suspicious credit card #s that have hit their system (ie ones from merchants' "suspicious/deleted" orders which otherwise the ccard companies never see since we don't even attempt to push them through their systems), and, in return, be able to crosscheck cards entered into their system against the suspicious list. A nice web API to do this wouldn't be too hard, although the API shouldn't itself take or reveal the entire card # either, for security reasons. But it could return spam-assassin-like scores and/or hints for other merchants' manual review ("A telecom merchant in NJ found a card matching 12 of those digits and with the same zip code suspicious 4 hours ago").
There's six mainstream lineages left, and they're NT5, 4BSD, Linux, System V, VMS, and whatever IBM's calling their systems architecture this week.
IBM kinda has two, right? You probably mean z/OS IBM's mainframe OS successor to MVS, but there's also i5/OS aka OS/400 which has a unique and interesting (imho) object-oriented system architecture. Last I checked IBM sold $1 billion of the latter every year (OS+hardware). Oh, and there's VM/CMS which is what all the virtualization efforts on all systems today are emulating (no pun intended) and trying to improve upon.
Just 2 cents from someone who learned about these when researching commercial operating systems a while back. I recognize these aren't mainstream to a Unix-head or Windows-head, but I guess once you toss in VMS, I'm think its worth mentioning MVS and OS/400.
This is kinda a side-note, but I found the article didn't explain what was going on very well.
The article implies that copper prices ($4.16/pound last May) are the reason pennies can be melted down profitably.
Since pennies are 97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper (says US Mint via google), the issue is that, at 154 pennies per pound, it's the zinc price rising above ~$2.00 that becomes an issue. And that happened last November (although it's now ~$0.77/pound for Zinc.) Zinc prices are the problem, not copper.
Just keep in mind that you cannot exceed the laws of physics... or chemistry. And it's damn hard to beat the energy density of gasoline with anything "practical" (for cars).
That "watch the energy density" tip was handed me by my father who has spent ~35 years in the petroleum industry.
I've found it a useful touchstone when assessing about the latest alternative "breakthroughs". If you know the energy density of the substitute, you can usually figure out what the "catch" is of the alternative. Batteries, hydrogen, etc.
Fusion in a cup solves a lot of problems of course. (But then we end up with a magnificent heat pollution problem... it's hard to get around entropy!) Good luck! I too hope we make some progress. Even a little progress can make a huge impact in a trillion-dollar industry!
You said: "Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything" Aren't 3 of those 4 basically the same thing: "ease", "usability", "intuitiveness"? Were those your four main categories of analysis? Those are all classic Windows strengths and the very core of the Windows Server value proposition. If that's indeed what your business most needs, your analysis does make sense. I can't say I'm shocked by "support" either... it's where you extrapolate to "everything" that I start to wonder what I'm missing.
I guess the other main question is who picked the experts; was it you or Microsoft?
Yeah, Nokia has nice cutting-edge stuff. I said "one of the first" precisely because I couldn't remember who else was doing what; I don't follow this stuff for a living, or even really as a dedicated hobby. Call me diletante.
My last purchasing decision was partially based on trying to figure out how a Windows(and Java) app I designed might work/notwork on the new platform; Nokia doesn't run Windows so I wasn't paying much attention in my last round of experimental cell phone decisions. That said, my experience suggests that Palm OS was overall more useful for me than Windows as a consumer. (I was hoping that since it was Windows, I could get Java to run on it... ha ha ha... what was I thinking? I never could get Java working on the PocketPC OS; Sun doesn't support it there it seems, by the way.) I had a coworker who used a high-end Nokia phone and swears by it (although it was even more expensive.)
I puchased an HP ipaq 6315 a year ago which was one of the first mobile phones to have classic cell phone service, GPRS internet, WiFi and bluetooth all in the same device. Here's what I've observed and learned, the first of which relates directly to Wi-Fi phone calling:
1) I tried making WiFi calls with Skype running on the MS PocketPC OS 2002. I *was* able to make a Skype call over WiFi... but I couldn't really hear much more than a word or two from the other person and lots of garble. Basically it was disappointingly unusable. I am not sure whether the slow 3-400MHz CPU is the problem or the nature of the non-optimizal internet connection and signalling overhead (I suspect the former). But I tried repeatedly, and I tried to move to be closer to the WiFi source with no positive effect. So this may not work great on mobile phones today. YMMV and "tomorrow" is a different story of course.
2) The cell phone seems to end up in wierd states that need rebooting. This happened once every few months with my Palm-based Treo, but has annoyingly, and ironically according to Microsoft stereotype, definitely been a once a week-type issue with my PocketPC phone. *Most* annoying is when it happens when you're on a call and you get a second inbound call and then system then gives you an unending series of dialog boxes in confusion. (By rebooting I really mean a "soft reset" where you need to push a thin object into a hole.) To be fair to Microsoft, it may be true that some fraction of those hangs might be due to bugs in the apps that lead to a platform-level hang. *But*, I can't cut MS too much slack because the MS platform doesn't give me a way to kill/restart the app it seems. (Note: I haven't had time to spend the hours necessary to research and get to the bottom of this.)
3) The cell-phone seems to lie about signal strength at times; it might show full signal but then right after I dial, it shrinks to two bars. I thought it might be a limitation of how polling/powersaving works, but in any case, I've found that I can't necessarily trust the "bar" ratings, even when I'm stationary, to describe signal strength until I actually make a call. I have zero idea whether this is caused by my phone, or just random emi interference, or the carrier or whether others have this same issue.
4) My favorite feature on both my Treo Palm and the PocketPC phone has been the ability to sync contacts on my phone with contacts on my PC (in MS Outlook, which I use for contacts but not for email.)
5) My second favorite feature has been the free downloadable musician tools available on the platform. (The selection was stronger on the Palm-based Treo.) I.e. metronome, tuner, and guitar chord charts. It's just very cool, since I always have my cell phone with me, that I also thus always have guitar chord charts in a pinch.
YMMV but here are the lessons I shelled out too much bucks to learn so I pass them along to my fellow Slashdotters.
So get a Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC cellphone that has WiFi and download Skype for it. If your carrier doesn't support high enough bandwidth, you won't be able to use Skype on it for voice, but with wireless it's no problem.
I had hopes for this in theory. Practice is another matter. I tried this once on an Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC with open WiFi (an HP 6315) and the quality was unworkable. I was able to connect to my coworker who was logged into Skype but I couldn't understand most of his words nor he mine. Your mileage may vary, but don't expect a $500 phone to solve all your problems in this regard. I was in a hallway next to the WiFi access point and there was one fairly ordinary wall between us; downloads/web worked fine, although I dunno the actual sustained bandwidth I was getting. The Skype specs for PocketPC I think specify a 400 MHz processor and I think my HP6315 (which is the best I could find 9 months ago) isn't quite at that speed-- that may have been the issue. Again, YMMV.
If you want a similar click-to-call link for your website, there are third-party providers like Civicom. They've had this service since 2001, with a merchant-pays-per-minute (like regular toll-free calling) business model although they've more recently diversified their product line.
I know they require persons to "press 1 to join the call" to minimize certain types of pranks/scams; I dunno if Google is doing that or not but they probably will.
(post1:) while atomic theory, gravitational theory, and germ theory can be tested, evolutionary theory cannot.
(post2:) Yes, it can, and has. If we found human remains in Precambrian strata, or if human DNA wasn't similar to the DNA of the other great apes, or if a cat ever gave birth to a dog, then evolution would be in trouble.
As an engineer watching this debate (and now dipping his toe into it), I don't find your rebuttal that persuasive. Analysis of the state of the world today (e.g. evolution) is a rational method, but it is not, to my mind, the scientific method (hypothesis, test, analyze, etc.) Whenever you are forced to use your analysis of a situation to predict and change it, your analysis is really tested in a fundamentally different (and superior) way than when you just take in new evidence and find you can make it mesh with prior evidence.
I confess I only skimmed a dozen of those speciation events in the FAQ you mentioned, but all the plant ones involved either observing or crossing-by-a-scientist. Not a scientist setting up an environment and watching chance do its work in creating new capabilities. (Actually some of the drosophila ones came at least close to using what I would consider the "scientific method" for evolution but I didn't find them too compelling. I didn't have the patience to wade through them all (work beckons) and you can discount my opinion appropriately.)
I've written natural simulation programs and I can tell you that it's not too hard to create an environment where, according to random chance a single trait changes from X to Y when you have coded a gene that allows variations in that trait. But evolution postulates that the genes weren't "created" and the notion of a trait wasn't "created" and that's a much subtler beast and based on what I've read over the years I don't quite buy that evolutionists have "proven" or even demonstrated it via a "scientific method".
I guess if I had to ask you one question, it'd be whether you agree with my distinction between a rational method and a scientific method. I see the latter being a subset of the former. If I'm wrong about that, then you probably don't have to even get into the evidentiary specifics.
--LP
A few comments on 3D UIs
on
3D User Interfaces
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· Score: 2, Informative
A) For a slash site covering next-gen UI issues, 3D and otherwise, check out Nooface. There's not a lot of discussion, but it has pretty good high-quality no-fluff content and occassional posts from people who really know their stuff or are actively working in the field.
B) The contrast between 3D FPSes (fun, fairly easy, compelling) and VRML/virtual worlds (often pretty awkward) always struck me as interesting and illustrative of the following point. Too many degrees of freedom makes an interface awkward and highly confusing to someone who hasn't had extensive experience with 3D... a loser at the "mother test." id Software and the 3D FPS genre have always benefitted a fair bit imho from architecting the world such that even though it was 3D, you only had 2 directions to go most of the time; forward and backward.
Wake me up when someone has a (non-bogus) study finding that users can actually be more productive in manipulating information with whatever 3D paradigm is being proposed. Eye candy helps but it's pretty easy to lose productivity going 3D imho.
SGI faced the innovator's dilemma big-time; it was tricky to cannabalize their $2 billion workstation business for a $300 million graphics card market. And to move from being a full-system vendor to being a graphics card vendor. And even with all the management and business-issue problems, I noticed three problems their engineering effortsg never overcame:
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
I don't mean to "split hairs" but I think your analysis misses something that is quite real to me based on my experience and I think it leads you to a false conclusion that "code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill in the [10-40 year] future.". (I say 10-40 since that's the context in which you are giving advice.)
Have you ever developed new software products or services for a young and growing company whose business depends on those products? I don't think you possibly could have, and still say that code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill. If writing code is so easy, why do you think Microsoft, arguably such a huge success, places such a premium on hiring the smartest people it can find?
Your argument about the value of science and math skills I totally agree with. But in the classic world there is a realm of expertise in between science and cheap, cheap construction... it's called "engineering". And while there's debate about the appropriateness of the term software engineering, I'd argue that there's a pretty big gap between "IT field work" and PhD-level coding for which there is going to be a willingness to pay for non-cheap labor for the discernable future.
They don't have a trace of responsibility or accountability, yet people walked out of the room when a "researcher" did something stupid?
Hrm. People vote with their dollars too you know.
I worked in the analyst business for 5 years. No need to be envious; it's not as easy as it looks. I avoided the "market share" research game mostly for the reasons you mention and focused on underlying technology and product developments, but now as a consumer trying to build a software asset and a business that's going to be around 15+ years, market share is probably the figure I'm more curious about than some of the more easily objectively-defined criteria that have higher degrees of certainty.
Only a fool thinks he could predict the future but only a fool tries not to.
Paying for help in figuring out "what's going on out there?" is not necessarily stupid. I'm a bit stingy and the value-add is still too low for my current corporate scenario, but having watched the sausage being made, I can still conceive of eating it at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the internet probably does need more bandwidth to support Netflix.
And I'm not a fan of QoS to get better streaming video either. But is Cerf giving up on fixing the problems with streaming (and any realtime internet work) that we know about, bufferbloat? I heard about that from Jim Gettys (thanks to a tweet from John Carmack). Here's a two-page intro in IEEE magazine or a (more interesting IMHO) PDF slide presentation with nice graphs and there is other advice and documents and code on that bufferbloat website.
See, the problem with streaming isn't just bandwidth, it's latency, and the variability thereof. We always measure and marketers talk about bandwidth, but only rarely if ever about latency. Thus ISPs don't optimize for it as a rule. The result? You get these occassional 6-second lags and other phenomena and little economic incentive to track them or fix them. (And certain data ISPs are at least mildly incented to look the other way since it protects their VOIP/PSTN revenues).
How about ISPs actually implement ECN to deal with it? How about router manufacturers design for this (or we all switch to OpenWRT?) How about we techies develop tools to help consumers monitor line quality latency (ping times) over time? How about consumers actually learn to care about latency or we educate them? It's not "too complicated" for consumers to understand; consumers can differentiate between velocity ("what's your car's fastest speed?") and acceleration ("how quickly can it go from 0 to 60?") so I'm sure we could get them to understand bandwidth versus latency. It's just not well measured/monitored right now. (I think we need a better phrase/metric that captures the notion of latency like the "0 to 60" one for cars.)
If you want to help develop measures of latency, use Bismark (or vote for it in the FCC open apps competition) or come up with an open source ping-until-quit tool that logs timestamps for long time periods and displays the results graphically and/or competitively. Better yet, make a phone app that does this and hooks it to google/whoever's maps and shares the data so fellow consumers can see which areas of the phone company networks really suck. (I'm open to hearing about other tools. I used to use a freeware one but it went payware and the best tools I know of are DSLReports's SmokePing and their other tools.)
100x greater bandwidth may make recorded video faster, but it won't solve core problems with realtime (streaming or video conferencing) video faster, nor web conferencing, nor necessarily online gaming. I sure as hell don't want the internet's quality to become as lousy as cell phones and that's what'll happen over time if we don't keep ISPs we pay the big bucks to focused on fixing the problems.
--LP
(Another too-late post...)
The difference between US "Fair Use" and UK "Fair Dealing" is at least somewhat described at https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Fair_dealing#United_Kingdom and in greater detail by a McGill Law Review PDF paper linked there.
As I read it, broadly the UK system enumerates a (restricted, fixed) set of allowed exceptions, while the US system allows any use conceivably to be "fair" pursuant to a set of factors (that are in practice defined by the court as-needed.)
Apparently the UK system doesn't explicitly allow "parody" which is one reason this comes up (as sort of referenced in the BBC article).
But I suspect the UK copyright minister isn't really interested in promoting "parody"; it's more about trying not to strangle the next Google from being invented in the UK. Ask yourself the broader business/economic question like "Google has taken such liberties with copyright fair use in their business model... man that worked out well... why couldn't Google have been invented in the UK? Oh yeah, the copyright system is really picky about what is/isn't allowed and this is anti-innovation; maybe we should legislate by liberty-allowing priority/tests than explictly enumerating consumers' rights and let the courts sort it out".
--LP
I've now looked at the Microsoft patent. While I don't know the specifics of the SGI O2 implementation, I doubt they were "processing each of the copies of the frame in parallel, using a different channel of the multiple channels of the GPU" as described in Claim 1. However, IANAL (or should I say IANAPA...)
The claims seem to revolve around handling certain parts of video encoding in a GPU vs certain parts in the CPU but the site is slashdotted so I can't review it at the moment.
All that said, if I were looking for prior art, I would look at SGI patents for SGI's Indigo IMPACT and/or IMPACT Compression board hardware (e.g. see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/SGI_Indigo2) and even better, the slightly later "O2" workstation graphics they implemented in 1997 (see http://www.wordiq.com/definition/SGI_O2 ). The IMPACT graphics video handling was done all in hardware off the CPU as far as I know, but the O2 had a unified memory architecture and integrated graphics in such a way that some video texture operations were handled on the graphics chipset (the MJPEG compression?) and some in the CPU (texture storage in general purpose RAM). Whether this split of CPU/GPU operations matches the claims MS is patenting, I don't know and would welcome informed comment.
(More broadly, I would add that I thought PCs were doing video decoding on the GPU as far back as Nvidia's Riva TNT if not the slightly earlier Riva 128 (1998). Don't know any implementation specifics tho.)
--LP
(Sorry I'm posting so late on this topic...)
If cars drive themselves, google's blog claims this could reduce greenhouse emissions.
This seems wishful thinking at best or greenwashing at worst... autonomous cars will be a disaster that will increase greenhouse gasses substantially.
Why?
1) because now more people can afford, in terms of their time, to drive further for work. So they will. And
2) if transportation of raw materials is cheaper because drivers aren't needed, the volume of material transported will go up, assuming the demand for goods is somewhat elastic with the price. With the amount of material transported increasing, the gasoline required for that transport and thus the carbon emitted will increase.
Color me a pessimist. Autonomous cars will be great for human freedom, and for human safety, but reduced greenhouse emissions is one thing that will not be a benefit.
Now if Google could build us some nice carpool-sharing app hooked to Google directions, with a reputation engine for the fellow passengers (perhaps in conjunction with their autonomous car work) to avoid unpleasant passenger surprises, *that* I could see helping reduce greenhouse emissions.
--LP
Actually none of my comments were meant to discuss re-using a one-time pad. I'm not sure which of my comments you're referring to, but perhaps you are thinking of my comment about splitting a 1TB one-time pad into 10 components, each for use with one of 10 different parties. That's not re-use. Otherwise, I completely agree with your comments that using a one-time pad multiple times is, by definition, no longer a one-time pad and has much different security properties.
--LP
I've been thinking this same thing (using USB keys for a OTP, and "why don't we do that?") for a couple years now, but 10 minutes after reading your post, the following problems/"considerations" with the USB OTP approach did start to enter my mind:
1) I can see that with a big 2TB pad, you'd also want/need to cycle through pads... the longer you keep the same pad without destroying it, the more data an attacker can get with rubber-hose cryptography if they recover your pad... by coming to your(or his/her) house with a gun and ripping the USB key off your neck. Or seizing it when you/they travel.
2) Also, the other trouble I can forsee with OTPs is that you need one of them for each person you need to communicate with securely. Typically if you are doing something needing this security, you are not doing it with just one other person... you also need to communicate with multiple parties. Once you have 5-10 parties to communicate securely with, the OTP can get a little cumbersome. Carrying around 5-10 USB keys and keeping them straight? And I can't envision it working with 200+ counterparties (a USB-OTP-for-the-web scenario). If you partition your 1TB USB into, say, 10 parts, one for each counterparty, you still have problems. You still need to get 1/10th of that USB key to each of the other parties without giving them the other 9/10ths of the key. (Or your whole gang could use a set of the same 1TB keys and you are trading off convenience versus chances of an informant/leaker, and if you're paranoid enough to be using 1TB OTP, why make that tradeoff?) And don't the counterparties need to communicate so they need their own web of keys?
3) There is the little problem of USB-PC security: wouldn't putting the USB key in a PC expose your whole OTP to the perhaps-infected PC? How does this actually work?
One can see that subversion-resistant secure random number generation, secure transport, and secure key usage, and secure key destruction are all required to make OTPs actually secure.
I predict someone will attempt to market USB one-time pads within 5 years as a sort of snake-oil bandaid, and I can see a distant future where they get used, but I don't see them becoming used widely/securely particularly soon. (Disclaimer: bank tokens that give you 5-digit codes for authenticating transactions do make a lot more sense to me however and might be one targetted use of this technology.)
--LP
P.S. I have not read the security literature on one-time pads. Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious.
P.P.S. I was kind of stunned last week though when getting a mini-SD card for my phone that I can, for $50, get something that is literally the width/length/thickness of my pinkie fingernail that contains 8GB.
Anyone know where I can get an old NeXT optical disc converted to a PC-accessible modern format?
I googled around, sent emails and filled in 'contact us' forms on a number of archive-retrieval websites and never got any response back.
Well, I tend to cynicism myself at times. But as a web programmer who doesn't desire to upgrade anything, the changes from HTML 4 to HTML 5 look like a nice batch of improvements. It looks like 85+% good stuff, and there is a decent handful of things that I wish we'd had ages ago and I'm bummed I can't start using today.
Just my two cents.
--LP
To start, I agree there are no magic bullets.
1) But nobody seems to have mentioned filtered DSL providers which might be a helpful option. You don't have to secure your PC to get filtered Internet.
I have a friend who gets filtered DSL Internet from a company called Integrity Online and that's worked well for him. There is also a list of other filtered Internet companies at: http://www.google.com/Top/Computers/Internet/Access_Providers/Filtered/. Basically these are ISPs who manage the proxy filters for you, which is more secure than doing it on your PC. (I dunno what you do if you want Cable or a particular ISP; contact the ISP for info then.)
Still, don't expect anyone's filters to be bullet-proof against a curious teen.
2) For someone going down this route, I would definitely strongly consider monitoring solutions in addition or as an alternative to filtering. Others have mentioned this, but it's worth understanding why monitoring is worth doing.
With filtering solutions, the filter company has to ensure they don't block innocuous content, like a NYTimes story that mentions sex. They have to have a low false-positive rate or they get complaints, extra work and dissatisfied customers. A good filter has to have human-review in the loop to avoid false positives, or automated content checks that are either too-strict or too-loose. And the achilles heel of human review is that it's always out of date.
But a monitoring system can have a much higher false-positive rate than a filter and still be effective. In other words, because monitoring systems don't block access like filters, they can cast a wider net and catch more objectionable material without becoming annoying/unworkable/circumvented-unknowingly. Also, the person being watched has no idea whether they are visiting material defined as objectionable so they tend to self-censor and it's much harder to skirt the boundaries of what gets you busted when you don't know what it is. Filters always leave you with an exact knowledge of "that passed, that failed" the filter.
For example, if the monitor just flags every URL that displays the word "sex" in the HTML (or IM message or filename) for example, for filtering this would be unacceptable when blocking, but with monitoring, you as a parent you can kinda just take a look at the list of flagged URLs and gauge if the URLs look like something you care about. Random news sites with the word... no big deal. Porn sites and experimentation to avoid the filter and/or monitor stand out much more easily though.
There's a free monitoring app you can put on your PC that emails to whoever is specified a 'suspicious visited URLs' list every couple weeks called X3watch. I don't know how how good/weak it is from a security standpoint but it flags way more than filters I've seen.
(Note that monitors don't necessarily catch every kind of traffic, nor do they necessarily tell you who was messing with the PC on a particular time/date.)
3) The kid can of course always visit an unfiltered PC/wifi-cell-phone at a library/school/internet-cafe/friend's house, or get DVDs/CDs/magazines from a friend, etc. At the end of the day the parent has to help them understand why they're choosing to restrict them and help them to make the same choices they are enforcing/recommending.
--LP
An interesting possible reason for 365's outage debacle was posted by someone on an O'Reilly Radar blog (emphasis added by me):
ajblardone [07.24.07 06:22 PM] I was there when the power went out. The generators kicked in right away. Some colos were fine others weren't. Mine went black for a while after the outage. 365 main had been working on electrical upgrades all week and this outage might have been bad timing for them... At 4pm 365 main sent out a notice saying the building was 100% operational and still running on the generators until PG&E confirms that utility power is stable.
As a merchant, I found myself treading the same path as jjeffers, initially notifying card companies and card owners and now just deleting the orders.
The card companies have structured the system so that liability rests with the merchants.
In part, this is smart because merchants will always have the best 'hinkiness' detectors at the point of the transaction. But it also means that the incentives for system-wide changes by the credit card vendors are weak.
There is certainly is room for improvement. I always thought it'd be cool for merchants to band together to share suspicious credit card #s that have hit their system (ie ones from merchants' "suspicious/deleted" orders which otherwise the ccard companies never see since we don't even attempt to push them through their systems), and, in return, be able to crosscheck cards entered into their system against the suspicious list. A nice web API to do this wouldn't be too hard, although the API shouldn't itself take or reveal the entire card # either, for security reasons. But it could return spam-assassin-like scores and/or hints for other merchants' manual review ("A telecom merchant in NJ found a card matching 12 of those digits and with the same zip code suspicious 4 hours ago").
--LP
[other agreeable/worthwhile comments skipped]
There's six mainstream lineages left, and they're NT5, 4BSD, Linux, System V, VMS, and whatever IBM's calling their systems architecture this week.
IBM kinda has two, right? You probably mean z/OS IBM's mainframe OS successor to MVS, but there's also i5/OS aka OS/400 which has a unique and interesting (imho) object-oriented system architecture. Last I checked IBM sold $1 billion of the latter every year (OS+hardware). Oh, and there's VM/CMS which is what all the virtualization efforts on all systems today are emulating (no pun intended) and trying to improve upon.
Just 2 cents from someone who learned about these when researching commercial operating systems a while back. I recognize these aren't mainstream to a Unix-head or Windows-head, but I guess once you toss in VMS, I'm think its worth mentioning MVS and OS/400.
--LP
This is kinda a side-note, but I found the article didn't explain what was going on very well.
The article implies that copper prices ($4.16/pound last May) are the reason pennies can be melted down profitably.
Since pennies are 97.5% zinc, 2.5% copper (says US Mint via google), the issue is that, at 154 pennies per pound, it's the zinc price rising above ~$2.00 that becomes an issue. And that happened last November (although it's now ~$0.77/pound for Zinc.) Zinc prices are the problem, not copper.
--LP
It depends on what you mean by "practical".
Just keep in mind that you cannot exceed the laws of physics... or chemistry. And it's damn hard to beat the energy density of gasoline with anything "practical" (for cars).
That "watch the energy density" tip was handed me by my father who has spent ~35 years in the petroleum industry.
I've found it a useful touchstone when assessing about the latest alternative "breakthroughs". If you know the energy density of the substitute, you can usually figure out what the "catch" is of the alternative. Batteries, hydrogen, etc.
Fusion in a cup solves a lot of problems of course. (But then we end up with a magnificent heat pollution problem... it's hard to get around entropy!) Good luck! I too hope we make some progress. Even a little progress can make a huge impact in a trillion-dollar industry!
--LP
You said: "Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything" Aren't 3 of those 4 basically the same thing: "ease", "usability", "intuitiveness"? Were those your four main categories of analysis? Those are all classic Windows strengths and the very core of the Windows Server value proposition. If that's indeed what your business most needs, your analysis does make sense. I can't say I'm shocked by "support" either... it's where you extrapolate to "everything" that I start to wonder what I'm missing.
I guess the other main question is who picked the experts; was it you or Microsoft?
Best,
--LP
Yeah, Nokia has nice cutting-edge stuff. I said "one of the first" precisely because I couldn't remember who else was doing what; I don't follow this stuff for a living, or even really as a dedicated hobby. Call me diletante.
... what was I thinking? I never could get Java working on the PocketPC OS; Sun doesn't support it there it seems, by the way.) I had a coworker who used a high-end Nokia phone and swears by it (although it was even more expensive.)
My last purchasing decision was partially based on trying to figure out how a Windows(and Java) app I designed might work/notwork on the new platform; Nokia doesn't run Windows so I wasn't paying much attention in my last round of experimental cell phone decisions. That said, my experience suggests that Palm OS was overall more useful for me than Windows as a consumer. (I was hoping that since it was Windows, I could get Java to run on it... ha ha ha
--LP
I puchased an HP ipaq 6315 a year ago which was one of the first mobile phones to have classic cell phone service, GPRS internet, WiFi and bluetooth all in the same device. Here's what I've observed and learned, the first of which relates directly to Wi-Fi phone calling:
1) I tried making WiFi calls with Skype running on the MS PocketPC OS 2002. I *was* able to make a Skype call over WiFi... but I couldn't really hear much more than a word or two from the other person and lots of garble. Basically it was disappointingly unusable. I am not sure whether the slow 3-400MHz CPU is the problem or the nature of the non-optimizal internet connection and signalling overhead (I suspect the former). But I tried repeatedly, and I tried to move to be closer to the WiFi source with no positive effect. So this may not work great on mobile phones today. YMMV and "tomorrow" is a different story of course.
2) The cell phone seems to end up in wierd states that need rebooting. This happened once every few months with my Palm-based Treo, but has annoyingly, and ironically according to Microsoft stereotype, definitely been a once a week-type issue with my PocketPC phone. *Most* annoying is when it happens when you're on a call and you get a second inbound call and then system then gives you an unending series of dialog boxes in confusion. (By rebooting I really mean a "soft reset" where you need to push a thin object into a hole.) To be fair to Microsoft, it may be true that some fraction of those hangs might be due to bugs in the apps that lead to a platform-level hang. *But*, I can't cut MS too much slack because the MS platform doesn't give me a way to kill/restart the app it seems. (Note: I haven't had time to spend the hours necessary to research and get to the bottom of this.)
3) The cell-phone seems to lie about signal strength at times; it might show full signal but then right after I dial, it shrinks to two bars. I thought it might be a limitation of how polling/powersaving works, but in any case, I've found that I can't necessarily trust the "bar" ratings, even when I'm stationary, to describe signal strength until I actually make a call. I have zero idea whether this is caused by my phone, or just random emi interference, or the carrier or whether others have this same issue.
4) My favorite feature on both my Treo Palm and the PocketPC phone has been the ability to sync contacts on my phone with contacts on my PC (in MS Outlook, which I use for contacts but not for email.)
5) My second favorite feature has been the free downloadable musician tools available on the platform. (The selection was stronger on the Palm-based Treo.) I.e. metronome, tuner, and guitar chord charts. It's just very cool, since I always have my cell phone with me, that I also thus always have guitar chord charts in a pinch.
YMMV but here are the lessons I shelled out too much bucks to learn so I pass them along to my fellow Slashdotters.
Cheers,
--LP
So get a Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC cellphone that has WiFi and download Skype for it. If your carrier doesn't support high enough bandwidth, you won't be able to use Skype on it for voice, but with wireless it's no problem.
I had hopes for this in theory. Practice is another matter. I tried this once on an Windows Mobile-based Pocket PC with open WiFi (an HP 6315) and the quality was unworkable. I was able to connect to my coworker who was logged into Skype but I couldn't understand most of his words nor he mine. Your mileage may vary, but don't expect a $500 phone to solve all your problems in this regard. I was in a hallway next to the WiFi access point and there was one fairly ordinary wall between us; downloads/web worked fine, although I dunno the actual sustained bandwidth I was getting. The Skype specs for PocketPC I think specify a 400 MHz processor and I think my HP6315 (which is the best I could find 9 months ago) isn't quite at that speed-- that may have been the issue. Again, YMMV.
--LP
I know they require persons to "press 1 to join the call" to minimize certain types of pranks/scams; I dunno if Google is doing that or not but they probably will.
--LP
(post1:) while atomic theory, gravitational theory, and germ theory can be tested, evolutionary theory cannot.
(post2:) Yes, it can, and has. If we found human remains in Precambrian strata, or if human DNA wasn't similar to the DNA of the other great apes, or if a cat ever gave birth to a dog, then evolution would be in trouble.
As an engineer watching this debate (and now dipping his toe into it), I don't find your rebuttal that persuasive. Analysis of the state of the world today (e.g. evolution) is a rational method, but it is not, to my mind, the scientific method (hypothesis, test, analyze, etc.) Whenever you are forced to use your analysis of a situation to predict and change it, your analysis is really tested in a fundamentally different (and superior) way than when you just take in new evidence and find you can make it mesh with prior evidence.
I confess I only skimmed a dozen of those speciation events in the FAQ you mentioned, but all the plant ones involved either observing or crossing-by-a-scientist. Not a scientist setting up an environment and watching chance do its work in creating new capabilities. (Actually some of the drosophila ones came at least close to using what I would consider the "scientific method" for evolution but I didn't find them too compelling. I didn't have the patience to wade through them all (work beckons) and you can discount my opinion appropriately.)
I've written natural simulation programs and I can tell you that it's not too hard to create an environment where, according to random chance a single trait changes from X to Y when you have coded a gene that allows variations in that trait. But evolution postulates that the genes weren't "created" and the notion of a trait wasn't "created" and that's a much subtler beast and based on what I've read over the years I don't quite buy that evolutionists have "proven" or even demonstrated it via a "scientific method".
I guess if I had to ask you one question, it'd be whether you agree with my distinction between a rational method and a scientific method. I see the latter being a subset of the former. If I'm wrong about that, then you probably don't have to even get into the evidentiary specifics.
--LP
A) For a slash site covering next-gen UI issues, 3D and otherwise, check out Nooface. There's not a lot of discussion, but it has pretty good high-quality no-fluff content and occassional posts from people who really know their stuff or are actively working in the field.
B) The contrast between 3D FPSes (fun, fairly easy, compelling) and VRML/virtual worlds (often pretty awkward) always struck me as interesting and illustrative of the following point. Too many degrees of freedom makes an interface awkward and highly confusing to someone who hasn't had extensive experience with 3D... a loser at the "mother test." id Software and the 3D FPS genre have always benefitted a fair bit imho from architecting the world such that even though it was 3D, you only had 2 directions to go most of the time; forward and backward.
Wake me up when someone has a (non-bogus) study finding that users can actually be more productive in manipulating information with whatever 3D paradigm is being proposed. Eye candy helps but it's pretty easy to lose productivity going 3D imho.
--LP
SGI faced the innovator's dilemma big-time; it was tricky to cannabalize their $2 billion workstation business for a $300 million graphics card market. And to move from being a full-system vendor to being a graphics card vendor. And even with all the management and business-issue problems, I noticed three problems their engineering effortsg never overcame:
- trouble with quality and shipping on time (see IMPACT)
- couldn't match/switch from 3-4-year development cycles of the workstation business to 6-month product cycles of the PC graphics card business
- engineers were loath to give up control of the chipset/box/OS in order to settle for just controlling the graphics subsystem. They tried to be a full-system player in a PC world. Given that Compaq couldn't really do it (something that was at least semi-obvious at the time), its not a surprise they, coming from the workstation space, couldn't do it with their integrated NT workstations.
- The engineers were delivering product that was differentiated but not in the areas that the biggest customers cared the most about. The benefits of UMA (unified memory architecture) graphics just weren't in sync with what the market most wanted: the fastest 3D at the cheapest price. And in the classic workstation space, polygon-pushing was what was most needed. Half their business was CAD workstations and in the end they lost that to Sun/HP/IBM who didn't have the sexy texture mapping stuff but could render polygons "good enough".
SGI also benefitted from many years from the other workstation vendors under-investing in 3D graphics. When that era ended, even the workstation business they were in got a heck of a lot more competitive.
Anyway, that's what comes to mind when I remember back to SGI in the mid-90s. In hindsight, I don't know of any silver bullets that would have gotten them out of the situation; it was death by a thousand cuts. At the time, I wondered if a merger with Apple would have made sense but it wasn't clear that the disfunctionality of the two organizations at the time would have melded into something better. Maybe a damn good CEO could have helped them carve out a more defensible role in the industry; that's the only thing that got Apple through as far as I'm concerned.
I don't mean to "split hairs" but I think your analysis misses something that is quite real to me based on my experience and I think it leads you to a false conclusion that "code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill in the [10-40 year] future.". (I say 10-40 since that's the context in which you are giving advice.)
Have you ever developed new software products or services for a young and growing company whose business depends on those products? I don't think you possibly could have, and still say that code writing is going to be a cheap, cheap skill. If writing code is so easy, why do you think Microsoft, arguably such a huge success, places such a premium on hiring the smartest people it can find?
Your argument about the value of science and math skills I totally agree with. But in the classic world there is a realm of expertise in between science and cheap, cheap construction... it's called "engineering". And while there's debate about the appropriateness of the term software engineering, I'd argue that there's a pretty big gap between "IT field work" and PhD-level coding for which there is going to be a willingness to pay for non-cheap labor for the discernable future.
--LP
They don't have a trace of responsibility or accountability, yet people walked out of the room when a "researcher" did something stupid?
Hrm. People vote with their dollars too you know.
I worked in the analyst business for 5 years. No need to be envious; it's not as easy as it looks. I avoided the "market share" research game mostly for the reasons you mention and focused on underlying technology and product developments, but now as a consumer trying to build a software asset and a business that's going to be around 15+ years, market share is probably the figure I'm more curious about than some of the more easily objectively-defined criteria that have higher degrees of certainty.
Only a fool thinks he could predict the future but only a fool tries not to.
Paying for help in figuring out "what's going on out there?" is not necessarily stupid. I'm a bit stingy and the value-add is still too low for my current corporate scenario, but having watched the sausage being made, I can still conceive of eating it at some point.
--LP