Posts by Doug Bostrom 127 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2008
Apple seems to be counting on the copyright authorities' ignorance of what is a baseband processor, what's actually possible in the way of manipulations and ultimately what methods are effective for control of such technology.
For an analogous worst-possible-case scenario, see the MadWiFi project. So far, the important secrets of the Atheros BBP have remained secure for practical purposes despite best efforts by the overweaningly curious with full access to the hardware interface. So unless Apple and its vendors have done a shockingly poor job, we're probably not looking at a casual effort to gain full control of the BBP.
Continuing the analogy, when the day comes that access to restricted functions of Atheros' chipsets is made into a scriptable method, the futility of attempting to maintain trivial secrecy as a substitute for scrupulous design will be more obvious. Then, finally, system designers will be forced to deal with this problem in complete way, maybe involving improved cryptographic handshaking between tower and handset, etc.
Lockheed is a like an enormous, sucking parasite attached to the U.S. government, too large to brush off without causing a hemorrhage yet toxic and sapping all the same.
Upside down G-sensors resulting in the partial destruction of decade-long deep space missions, satellites dropped by Lockheed followed by bills from Lockheed for their repairs, expensive and ineffective cargo sniffing systems followed by proposals for "improved" systems twice as expensive yet only 1/5th more useful, useless merchant marine identification schemes, the list seems endless. They've completely metastasized. Yet they're too large to fail, too large to ignore when letting contracts.
"If we can measure Arctic Ice thickness from orbit, and from low-flying aircraft, WTF was the Catlin expedition ever about?"
A little bit about producing a wavering, incomplete line of data points but mostly posing for photos in brightly colored expedition wear, producing a TV special, complaining about how hard it was while failing to mention it was an all-volunteer army. The usual reasons for a jumped-up "expedition" to the Arctic. See "Top Gear" and their special for an archetype.
Where's Steven Goddard when we need him?
Also, why was this:
"The Greenland and Antartic ice sheets being watched by ICESat contain 77 per cent of the Earth's fresh water. If their collective stored water volume were to be released into the ocean, the global sea level would rise about 80m (260ft), according to NASA. Even a small change in the average thickness of 0.1 per cent (2.4m) would cause the global sea level to rise 8.3cm."
stuck in the middle of the article? Nothing to do w/the Arctic sea ice and it'll just bring the fossil fuel industry chumps out of the woodwork, braying about floating ice cubes, etc.
Not practical, sadly, but if you've ever wondered how the batteries in a satellite last through literally tens of thousands of cycles (see LEO satellite eclipse experience), or for that matter how the Mars Rovers keep ticking after 5 years, it's because their batteries are sized such that they're never substantially depleted. They're never run down below where they have perhaps 80% of nominal capacity remaining. Less movement of "stuff" in the battery equals longer preservation of cell geometry.
Unfortunately that would mean a huge battery pack for a laptop if you wanted to use it for more than an hour or so.
Hubble engineers discovered a few years ago that conditioning the batteries on the telescope was actually ruining the batteries. Since abandoning the conditioning process the batteries on the spacecraft have lost little if any capacity, after losing something like 30% largely due to following conventional wisdom on conditioning.
A wonderful battery technology we're leaving untapped is simply improving the quality of software construction so that we don't need to have bomb-like batteries to accomplish things that would need less juice if software were better made...
Deadly dull repetition of what many others have observed, but even if Fukui were correct and the EV range was as short as he previously said I suspect I'm not the only one who'd then never have to purchase petrol for daily needs. Two cars are in my garage; if one were all-electric and the other gasoline my needs would be completely met, with the electric unit covering probably 80% of the miles I drive. My automotive-related hydrocarbon consumption would collapse.
A little perfectionism can sure go a long way to hindering pragmatic progress.
Obviously for a new machine it's necessary to not only practice maneuvers but also expose handling flaws. However I wonder if anybody has done a rigorous analysis of the cost/benefit of landing practice in the form of "touch and go"? Brief scrutiny of the AAIB and NTSB databases reveals that for every actual off-field accident or genuine landing incident there seem to be perhaps 10 cases of aircraft being bent/broken while the pilot was performing landing practice maneuvers. Maybe there's a curve to this, with a sweetspot beyond which the probability of an accident increases with further practice?
30 years on, is it not just a bit boring and repetitious to find ourselves being herded into yet another kleptomaniacal gambit by MS? Can't MS do --anything-- new, besides attempting to corral customers into annoying, time-stealing interlocking marketing arrangements with various gullible "partners"?
Has anybody bothered to calculate how much of our precious lives will be sapped by our unwilling embrace of Microsoft's latest "me, too!" attempt to conscript us into enduring marketing-first technical-prowess-second dross? Really, life is too short. Wholesale reinvention is not the way to a useful communications grammar, particularly when the inventor's objectives are so abjectly pedestrian.
Of course, as usual the trade press is exhibiting the usual curious lack of a functioning hippocampus; wide-eyed innocence all 'round, as though this were not the usual player with the usual deadly dull attempt to first effectively steal and then lease back other people's data.
The one act pony, made new again. How sad for us all.
How did Metcalfe and crew settle on such a crappy connector? Entire civilizations could have been built by redirecting countless millions of manhours effort devoted to untwisting, rearranging then stuffing wire pairs into connector bodies, finally attempting to hold the whole mess together while squinting and crimping. Couldn't there have been second, slightly less squishy connector option, where one --knows-- one has an actual connection and where the physical locking of the connector does not depend on the elasticity of a little plastic tab?
Vendors, moving like a cloud of bluebottles from one public policy dunghill to another, laying little eggs of political cowardice that later bloom into big, fat, tasty and lucrative maggots of legislation.
Law enforcement seems particularly susceptible to this. Here in the U.S. prisons are industrialized, publicly traded, and of course the shareholders demand ever-improving quarterlies. Every wonder =why= we're (poor saps in U.S.) now incarcerating over 1 in 100 of our residents, with the largest absolute number of prisoners on the entire planet? Shareholder Value, that's why!
Go, New Zealand! Economic stimulus demands that you enable and then forever expand your vendors' business models!
Yecchh.
Home Basic: "... just three applications concurrently..."
Now that's innovation. Not only does MS flip a few bits to turn off chunks of their own ware, but they even make sure you don't simultaneously enjoy too much of everybody else's stuff.
BTW, are applications bundled with Windows included in the limit? Anybody who's been exposed to this travesty able to say?
"Really Have To" migrate means we all tacitly accept that we don't control our IT, MS does. Same sort of sheepishly grinning shuffle as when you're being herded into a stadium as part of a mass arrest, or other totalitarian psychological jujitsu action. Gas chamber comes to mind, but perhaps that's a bit strong.
"“The countries most affected by Conficker have a high percentage of pirated windows users, who may not be entitled to apply Microsoft’s patch. This could be a factor in the spread of the worm.”
Exactly, and this highlights Microsoft's conflicting goals of protecting their intellectual property while simultaneously protecting all of us from the perils they've imposed on us by their own success.
Pirated copies of the OS are locked into a vulnerable state, thus putting all of us at risk. This is because MS has decided that their own well-being trumps that of the general public.
Worse yet, many of us do not use autoupdate because the contents of any given update may or may not include code that is antithetical to customers' own interests. A relatively few tweaks and adjustments to DRM for Microsoft's own benefit as well as media partners erode our trust to the point that many of us are very reluctant to give them the keys to our Windows folders.
Finally, is it any surprise that corporations are loathe to roll out patches that may end up shutting down large swathes of business operations? Just a couple of such instances are enough to drive down acceptance of autoupdate.
We're going to see this get much worse, unless MS decides to take the long view and cut dividends in order to preserve some muscle for later. What's astonishing is how long it took them to see the handwriting on the wall and begin reversing their hiring/building/leasing binge. Astonishing, but after such a long run of success I suppose complacency is not really all that surprising.
How will all of this hydrogen be produced? We're still waiting for a process that offers reasonable efficiency, scales well, and does not rely on hydrocarbons for feedstock.
Meanwhile, regarding the cars themselves, Lotus know better than any others how to build cars with efficient use of mass. Light cars, yet able to meet safety standards, a deft trick.; Lotus is well positioned to do this right. A 200kg battery in a 1,000kg car is way more useful than a 400kg battery in a 1,500kg car...
"You got the wrong end here by picking a living language for your example. English has replaced a huge number of other languages, and presumably may be replaced itself at some point."
Good point.
Languages also live or die by network effects. For us humans, it's probably down to a choice of Spanish, English or Mandarin. For computers, something so UNIX-like there's no practical difference, or something that started as Windows but is becoming more fragmented and recognizable as time passes (thus losing benefits network effect), or... what?
Is it really a given that Linux will die a slow death as a legacy platform?
Viewed as a linguistic problem, operating systems have undergone a lightning evolution, but there's no certainty that we'll continue to find reasons to reinvent what has already proven to work and to track evolving demands. The English language has never been displaced--- to be replaced by a whole-cloth reimplementation-- but instead has seamlessly morphed to support changing requirements.
Perhaps we'll instead see a continuing shift of operating systems to an evolutionary approach, a speculation that Linux seems to support. Windows also attempts to evolve, but its private ownership seems a hindrance rather than an advantage. Pushing the concept maybe a little too far, If English were owned by a private entity it's doubtful it would have seen such wide adoption or longevity.
Save money be shifting work over to additional entities who in turn must make a profit. Something has to give, and of course it's the quality of life for the people doing the actual wok. It's all ok as long as we don't think about it too much. Sort of like making sausages...
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