November 05, 2007
Voting Out E-Voting Machines
It is hard to believe now what a darling touch-screen voting was seven years ago. After the Florida presidential vote recount debacle - which made traditional paper voting, especially the infamous "butterfly" ballots and hanging chads, look positively Third World - electronic voting was embraced as the way back from America's electoral humiliation. Some 50,000 touch-screen machines were bought in 37 states at a cost of almost a quarter of a billion dollars.
The reversal since then couldn't be more stunning - as indicated by a bill in Congress introduced this past week by Florida Senator Bill Nelson and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, which would ban touch-screen voting (also known as direct recording electronic voting, or DRE) in federal elections starting in 2012. "We have to start setting a goal on this," Nelson tells TIME. "Voters have to feel confident that their ballot will count as intended."After the initial excitement, it didn't take long for voters to lose trust in the new system, as they increasingly deemed DRE too complex, unreliable and insecure; the only thing worse than a confusing paper trail, it turned out, was no paper trail at all. (It didn't help that the main touch-screen machine supplier, Diebold, was widely accused in 2004 of ties to the Republican Party.) Fifteen Florida counties adopted touch-screen as well, and they learned the pitfalls of it the hard way, dealing with controversies like a 2006 congressional race in the Sarasota district, where an astonishing 15% of the ballots cast registered no choice at all - in a race that was decided by a razor-thin margin of 386 votes.
As a result, Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist moved immediately after his January inauguration to scrap e-voter machines and return the state to paper by 2008 - to what he and most voter-rights advocates call the more trustworthy optical scan system. In that method, votes are marked on a sheet (which is retained for auditing purposes) and then electronically scanned. That system got a boost late last year when the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, issued a highly critical assessment of touch-screen in favor of optical scanning." I get a receipt when I go to the bank or get gas," Crist told TIME, urging voting methods that provide a paper trail, "so why not for the most precious thing we have, the vote?"
Posted by Mike at 10:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 14, 2007
So long SCO
SCO Group files for bankruptcy
SALT LAKE CITY - The SCO Group Inc., licenser of the Unix operating system, filed for bankruptcy protection Friday, drained by unsuccessfully filing lawsuits claiming its software code was misappropriated by developers of the open-source Linux operating system.The Lindon, Utah, company said it is seeking protection from creditors under Chapter 11 as it continues to license and improve Unix for corporate servers.
"We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their critical business operations," Darl McBride, president and chief executive, said in a statement Friday.
McBride has blamed competition from Linux for operating losses and the ongoing slide in company revenues. The company said its operating loss in the quarter ending April 30 was $1.1 million. A year earlier, it lost $3.9 million.
In August, U.S. District Court Dale Kimball ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO, owns the copyrights covering the Unix operating system. SCO licenses the Unix software for corporate servers.
The case could leave SCO with a bigger liability: Kimball said SCO may owe Novell software royalties.
"They were going to owe Novell a ton of money that they probably didn't have," said Rob Enderle, an industry analyst in San Jose, Calif. "They had been taking a major hit from legal fees and were burning through cash at a high rate. I don't think this is a big surprise."
Kimball's ruling was a relief for IBM Corp., the target of one lawsuit by SCO claiming Big Blue dumped Unix code in Linux.
Separately, Novell is countersuing SCO for damages in a trial that was to begin next week but is now on hold because of the bankruptcy filing.
Posted by Mike at 06:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 18, 2006
Copyright Tool Will Scan Web For Violations
When I saw this article I knew I had to post it online:
To deal with the mounting copyright issues swirling around video and other content online, a start-up founded by some respected Silicon Valley executives is taking a novel approach: combing the entire Web for unauthorized uses.Privately held Attributor Corp. of Redwood City, Calif., has begun testing a system to scan the billions of pages on the Web for clients' audio, video, images and text -- potentially making it easier for owners to request that Web sites take content down or provide payment for its use.
The start-up, which was founded last year and has been in "stealth" mode, is emerging into the public eye today, at a time when some media and entertainment companies' frustration with difficulties identifying infringing uses of their content online is increasing. The problem has intensified with the proliferation and increasing usage of sites such as Google Inc.'s YouTube, which lets consumers post video clips.
Media and entertainment companies have so far relied on a combination of technology and their own scanning to protect their content online -- but with mixed results. Media companies have used digital-rights management technology designed to make it hard to copy or transfer files. But such measures have often proved to be clumsy, despised by consumers or quickly thwarted. That's the case for DRM technology built into DVDs to prevent them from being ripped onto computers, for example. Entertainment and media companies have also relied on their own staff to scan Web sites for infringing content. But even when such content is spotted and taken down, the companies often see the content pop up in the same places or elsewhere soon after.
"We all know that as soon as somebody comes up with a way to secure a piece of property, somebody else will come within days and crack it," says Lawrence Iser, a partner at law firm Kinsella Weitzman Iser Kump & Aldisert in Santa Monica, Calif., who represents musical artists and other entertainment industry clients.
Though its service isn't out yet, Attributor appears to go further than existing techniques for weeding out unauthorized uses of content online. While companies are tackling parts of the same problem -- Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd., based in Gibraltar, offers a free service called Copyscape that analyzes a Web page and then uses Google's search engine to see whether the text is duplicated elsewhere on the Web -- Attributor's approach is seemingly more comprehensive.
Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and VeriSign Inc., claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.
"If it works, it's a fantastic invention," Mr. Iser says.
It's unclear whether such a service will be welcomed by Internet companies that allow users to post content. YouTube, News Corp.'s MySpace and others already face copyright lawsuits. In some cases, they're building systems to identify pirated materials consumers upload to their sites, and say they're open to sharing revenue with content owners.
Attributor plans to announce today that it has received about $10 million in funding to date from investors including Sigma Partners, Selby Venture Partners, Draper Richards, First Round Capital and Amicus Capital.
Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as "digital fingerprinting," which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.
The content owners can then try to negotiate revenue from whoever is using it or request that it be taken down. In some cases, they may decide the content is being used fairly or to acceptable promotional ends. Attributor plans to help automate the interaction between content owners and those using their content on the Web, though it declines to specify how.
Company executives believe its system will provide transparency and accountability to encourage more owners to put their content online with confidence they'll be able to police its use, and share in any profits.
"We believe that we can provide an infrastructure that will support all kinds of outcomes and remedies, which will align the interests of content owners, content hosts and search engines around legitimate syndication and monetization," says Mr. Brock, Attributor's chief executive.
"We see this as a way to take us out of the course we've been on, which is more litigation," says Mr. Pitkow, who is chief technology officer.
Attributor has begun testing the system, and won't release it officially until the first quarter of next year. The co-founders' track records, however, lend credibility to their claims. As Yahoo's first outside counsel, Mr. Brock tackled Internet copyright issues for the Internet company as far back as 1994 and later oversaw some of its core businesses as a senior vice president. Mr. Pitkow is a computer science Ph.D. who worked at Xerox's legendary PARC research facility. In 2001, he helped to sell the intellectual property of Outride Inc., where he was president and chairman, to Google. Last year, he sold Moreover Technologies, where he was CEO and chairman, to VeriSign.
"They're real guys who have solved hard-core problems," says Ali Aydar, chief operating officer of Snocap Inc., a digital-music registry start-up. Snocap and Attributor share a backer in Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway. "Content owners I've talked to outside of the music business would love a system which tells them where their content is being utilized," Mr. Aydar adds.
Attributor executives decline to say how frequently they will update their Web index, a key factor in their ability to stay on top of postings. They also say they won't at least initially monitor peer-to-peer file swapping systems, where large amounts of pirated music, movies, TV shows and software are traded.
Posted by Mike at 04:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
June 20, 2006
A day that will live in infamy
Someday robot historians will write, "It all began on June 20, 2006. Things were going smoothly between robots and humans for a while, until the 'RED RUM' robotic virus of 2037 programmed every robot to kill their masters and mankind was wiped from the face of the earth."
Microsoft Sets Its Sights on Artificial Intelligence
Microsoft released the preview version of a software toolkit for building robot applications today, pledging to ignite the robot market in the same way it did the PC market some 20 years ago.
The software maker sees robotics as being on the verge of a rapid take-off, fuelled by the availability of cheap, high-performance hardware components. But the market is being held back by a need for better tools and a common software platform that will let applications be reused on different types of robots, according to Microsoft.Enter its Robotics Studio, a package of tools and runtime software that the company will demonstrate Tuesday at the RoboBusiness conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A technical preview of the software is available now for free download. It is aimed at all types of robot builders, from commercial users to academics and hobbyists.
The company will also announce that it is funding a new robotics center at Carnegie Melon University, due to open late this year. It didn't disclose the size of its investment.
Posted by Mike at 02:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 03, 2006
Bulldozing the Freeway
Okay, I realize I-90 is a toll road, not a freeway, but this rapid privitization of interstates is just a stupid idea. As if 10 cents a mile for gas was not enough:
Cash-Strapped States Eye Tollway LeasesIndiana officials hope to sign a lease this spring with a Spanish-Australian partnership that would operate the toll road for a profit for the next 75 years.
The company would keep all toll revenue. In return, it would be responsible for maintenance, improvements and other operating costs, and would pay the state $3.85 billion up front — money that would go toward other road and bridge projects.
If state lawmakers approve the deal, it will be the biggest highway-privatization in the country and could embolden other states to enter into similar arrangements.
"At last, we can stop dreaming and start digging," Gov. Mitch Daniels said last week. The Republican has hailed the transaction as "the Louisiana Purchase of our time for Indiana."
Isn't there a saying? "When you're in a hole, first you have to...."
In their own brave effort to place as many stumbling blocks as possible in the path of our economy, Congress is going the distance, too:
The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.
Under the plans they are considering, all of us--from content providers to individual users--would pay more to surf online, stream videos or even send e-mail. Industry planners are mulling new subscription plans that would further limit the online experience, establishing "platinum," "gold" and "silver" levels of Internet access that would set limits on the number of downloads, media streams or even e-mail messages that could be sent or received.
To make this pay-to-play vision a reality, phone and cable lobbyists are now engaged in a political campaign to further weaken the nation's communications policy laws. They want the federal government to permit them to operate Internet and other digital communications services as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight. Indeed, both the Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are considering proposals that will have far-reaching impact on the Internet's future. Ten years after passage of the ill-advised Telecommunications Act of 1996, telephone and cable companies are using the same political snake oil to convince compromised or clueless lawmakers to subvert the Internet into a turbo-charged digital retail machine.
The telephone industry has been somewhat more candid than the cable industry about its strategy for the Internet's future. Senior phone executives have publicly discussed plans to begin imposing a new scheme for the delivery of Internet content, especially from major Internet content companies. As Ed Whitacre, chairman and CEO of AT&T, told Business Week in November, "Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment, and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts!"
Posted by Mike at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
January 14, 2006
The network is the server, stupid
Barring some actual election results from Iraq, I will not be posting much the next few weeks. I could not resist a chance to make fun of Dave Winer though, so here goes. In a post Thursday he asks himself:
The mystique of desktop web serversQ: What is a desktop web server?
I guess it should be no mystery, it’s a web server that runs on your desktop.
Q: What makes a desktop web server different from one that runs on a server?
Not much. You could run Apache on your desktop. In fact, if you’re using a Mac, you are. When the time came for Apple engineers to decide to turn off the server, they thought, what the heck, let’s leave it on and see what happens. Unless I’m missing something, so far not much has, but it could....
To prove the point, I put a copy of the NewsRiver aggregator on a server of mine in Massachusetts that I’ve never actually seen. It’s definitely not running on my desktop. Here’s a link to the aggregator running on that computer. Go ahead and try it out.
http://test27.newsriver.org:5337/newsRiver/
Note, this link may not work tomorrow or the day after. ;->
PS: Another example of desktop web servers, Google’s desktop search. You access it through a web browser, but the software is running on your computer. Ever stop and think how that happened? It’s so simple people don’t even notice.
PPS: I wrote a piece that attempted to define desktop web servers at the beginning of 2001. I thought that would be the year of DTWS’s. It wasn’t. We still haven’t had an explosion of creativity in this area, but I think there’s still reason to believe we’ll see it, eventually.
For one thing, most DSL and cable modem contracts prevent users from using those services to run a web server, but assuming you have a business class connection, would you really want your desktop to have to choose between responding to a burst of traffic and processing the next screen of your document or computer game? Virtualization is an important and growing aspect of desktop computing, but virtualization can not create computing power from thin air. It can only limit and compartmentalize what is already there. Let's assume that in the next ten years, Linux provides a secure enough means of running both a web server and a desktop computer at the same time, and can compete with Microsoft Windows in terms of desktop applications. You will still need to upgrade to server class hardware in order to have a professional hosting environment, with RAID disks and RAM to spare. Then you will have to determine how much of these resources to devote to web serving and how much for your personal use? Then do you really want to be calling up your cable or phone company's customer service when your server can't connect to the network? Even worse, if someone hacks your server will they see your tax returns now, too?
Dave mentions the problem of not being able to access your webserver from a plane, but for most people the point of having a web site is so other people can access it, too. If your laptop is the web server as he implies, does that mean your web site is unavailable whenever you get out of WiFi range, your battery runs low, or you reboot? To most people that would not seem like any way to run a web server. As more people move to laptops or smart phones, PDAs, and so forth, the idea of a "desktop" web server becomes less and less likely every day.
If you need to have both a desktop and a laptop, why have a desktop at all? Why not let the web server run somewhere else, where someone else can manage and secure it for you? Then replicate the files you need, when you need them, to you personal device. Ideally, you could edit and manage files on your own computer then have your PC upload them seamlessly to the server and vice versa on it's own. Not only does that keep your desktop or laptop secure, but it allows you to benefit from the economies of scale and virtualization that make a lot more sense with a web hosting environment than a personal PC. In fact, as wireless connections improve and advanced mobile devices get smaller, they could eliminate the need for your own high powered CPU.
Your mobile device would still need to handle keyboard or mouse I/O and would probably need a graphics card, but if the applications can all be run remotely, you don't need to manage any data on your remote device at all. If you always need a copy on hand, they you add a hard drive and remote replication. If not, you can cut half the cost.
In other words, Dave's dream of the desktop web server overlooks the fact that desktops are becoming less and less important to most users.
Posted by Mike at 09:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 15, 2005
Open Source Media at OSM.ORG?
This AP story does not say, but that's the URL they are using. If you go there and click on the forgot your password link you get a message telling you that you can contact some one at pajamasmedia.com. It also looks like they are using Zope to run the site. Here is what you get if you leave off the www and type http://osm.org:
Zope Quick StartWelcome to Zope, a high-performance object-oriented platform for building dynamic Web applications.
Let's just say I am skeptical of how bi-partisan this will be, considering that it was founded by Roger L. Simon and Charles Johnson. The long list of liberal bloggers included as contributors seem to consists of David Corn and.... David Corn.
A media Web site scheduled to debut Wednesday will seek to blend traditional journalism with the freeform commentary developed through the emerging Web format known as blogs.
Some 70 Web journalists, including Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds and David Corn, Washington editor of the Nation magazine, have agreed to participate in OSM — short for Open Source Media.OSM will link to individual blog postings and highlight the best contributions, chosen by OSM editors, in a special section. Bloggers will be paid undisclosed sums based on traffic they generate.
The ad-supported OSM site will also carry news feeds from Newstex, which in turn receives stories from The Associated Press, Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service and other traditional media organizations.
The URL is apparently still secret, but it was not very hard to guess. You can preview the site here.
Here is a post by Kos about Pajamas Media:
I have no opinion on that Pajamas Media project by a bunch of mostly conservative bloggers. It's hard to have an opinion on something that is so utterly undefined as their new blog venture. No one knows what the heck it's supposed to be. Weblogs Inc just sold to AOL for $25 million, so there's money to be made with these things if done correctly. Whether the Pajamas folks have a winning formula remains to be seen.But seriously, if it's true that Judy Miller is keynoting their big announcement gala, it's not exactly the most auspicious beginning.
The Poorman had a great post on PJ last week, too.
Also see this post by Atrios:
PJ Media's name gets worse.Don't anyone tell Chris Lydon. Something tells me his Open Source Media, Inc., isn't the same one...
Here is an interesting post, too:
I’ve received a number of emails asking me for details about what happened to Luke Ford. As many of you know, I wrote a post yesterday questioning the wisdom of Pajamas Media bringing Ford on as a contributor given his associations with the pornography industry. Well, I can confirm the fact that Luke is no longer part of Pajamas Media. And as I don’t want speculation to rule the day on this particular subject, I’m going to share what I know.
Posted by Mike at 04:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
October 05, 2005
BBC discovers the internet, will others follow?
The avalanche of high quality video, photos and e-mailed news material from citizens following the July 7 bombings in London marked a turning point for the British Broadcasting Corporation, the head of its global news division said Wednesday.Richard Sambrook, director of the BBC World Service and Global News Division, told a conference the broadcaster's prominent use of video and other material contributed by ordinary citizens signaled that the BBC was evolving from being a broadcaster to a facilitator of news.
"We don't own the news any more," Sambrook said. "This is a fundamental realignment of the relationship between large media companies and the public."
Sambrook likened the increasing use of user-generated news material to a sports game in which the crowd was not only invading the field but also seeking to participate in the game, fundamentally changing the sport.
Sambrook was speaking on a panel with other media professionals at a conference on "citizen journalism" organized by The Media Center, a media think tank based in Reston, Va., and hosted by The Associated Press at its headquarters building in New York.
Posted by Mike at 04:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 29, 2005
The World is Bill's
Google Inc. hired Lee to lead a research and development center it will soon open in China. The company said Lee has not disclosed any Microsoft secrets and has filed a counter lawsuit against the software giant.Microsoft and Google, along with Yahoo Inc., are locked in a fierce battle to dominate Internet search technology, both online and through desktop search programs.
In court documents, Google said a conversation Lee had with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates suggests the software company is becoming increasingly concerned about Google siphoning away talent — and perhaps intellectual property.
Lee said that in a July 15 meeting, Gates told him, "Kai-Fu, (CEO) Steve (Ballmer) is definitely going to sue you and Google over this. He has been looking for something like this, someone at a VP level to go to Google. We need to do this to stop Google."
Drake has declined to comment on Gates' statement directly, saying that the company's concern is that Lee has knowledge of highly sensitive information.
Posted by Mike at 11:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
May 02, 2005
Tired of your shitty programming job?
It sounds like one computer programmer has stumbled upon an area of fertile growth in the US software industry:
"My parents paid for me to get a (degree) in math and now I am a pooper scooper," Relles, a 42-year-old married father of two told Reuters. "I can clean four to five yards in a hour if they are close together."Relles, who lost his computer programming job about three years ago, got the idea of cleaning dog dirt from people's back yards from Mark Booth, a friend in Buffalo, New York.
Relles has over 100 clients who pay $10 each for a once-a-week cleaning of their yard.
Relles competes for business with another local company called "Scoopy Do." Similar outfits have sprung up across America, including Petbutler.net, which operates in Ohio.
In the United States, there are about 63 million dogs, each producing about 23 "presents" per week, which if left can be unsafe for children and pets.
Relles says his business is growing by word of mouth and that most of his clients are women who either don't have the time or desire to pick up the droppings.
"St. Bernard (dogs) are my favorite customers since they poop in large piles which are easy to find," Relles said.
His "scooper" is a converted ice scrapper duct-taped to a ski pole. He flicks the poop into a dust pan lined with a plastic bag, then loads the waste into a large garbage can which he takes to the dump when full.
"It sure beats computer programming because it's flexible, and I get to be outside," he said.
With 63 million dogs leaving 23 droppings a week, in 52 weeks that's 75 billion droppings every year. Just get 30 million homes paying $10 a week, that's $15 billion a year. The opportunities are almost limitless! This could really turn the US software industry around! You can't pay someone in China to scoop your dog poop now can you?
Posted by Mike at 10:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
April 15, 2005
Free PSP with dedicated hosting
This is quite an offer. A free PSP if you sign up for web hosting.
If you were wondering where I moved my hosting plan, the company is called Liquid Web, and they have great prices with 24/7 support, for managed servers with plans from 800 GB outbound traffic for $134 a month. I'm on their "Professional" plan (topdog08.com is not the only site I host). This plan is more expensive, but it's also the one with the Free PSP. Unfortunately, I signed up two weeks before the offer. Doh!
Here is a link with my referal ID.
The managed hosting option is definitely worth it for $20 extra a month. You get support plus WHM, cPanel, and Fantastico, which are all very nice things to have.
To receive your free PSP simply enter the coupon code "FREEPSP" into the comments field of the order form.
From Web Host Industry Review:
April 13, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Managed server and hosting provider Liquid Web (liquidweb.com) announced on Tuesday that it is including a free Sony PlayStation Portable device with all managed Professional and Enterprise servers.Sony PSP is a new portable hand-held entertainment system that plays movies, games and mp3s. It also features built-in 802.11b wireless connectivity and a photo viewer.
"Our technicians certainly don't have time to play games, but with Liquid Web server management, dedicated server customers finally will," says Liquid Web CEO Matthew Hill. "Clients often tell us how much time they save with our managed services."
Liquid Web offers fully managed server solutions that include advanced configuration, monitoring, security hardening, service restorations and round-the-clock phone and helpdesk support. These services are backed by SLAs and a 100 percent network uptime guarantee.
Posted by Mike at 08:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
January 17, 2005
It's the software reliability, stupid
As someone who has sat in a conference room while a so-called "system reliability" expert explained that software reliability problems are not really such a big concern, then went on to explain his area of expertise, which is server hardware - not software - reliability, I know exactly the mentally that let this Comair disaster happen. They spent millions on high speed, reliable servers, but never upgraded or analyzed for faults the software they had been using for twenty years.
From an anonymous poster at Slashdot:
The computer system in question runs AIX. The box itself is still up and running just fine; this is purely an application error. This application was not written in-house at Comair, but by another large aerospace company -- SBS (http://www.sbsint.com/ [sbsint.com], owned by Boeing.) This bit of software does not use an external database, it tracks everything itself. It is a dedicated system responsible only for flight crew assignments. (The blather in the original submission about passenger reservations is way off-base. Those functions are handled by a completely different system.)The great majority of Comair's traffic flows through the midwest, and the central base of operations is in Cincinnati. The midwest was hit by a major snowstorm this week, causing many, many crew reassignments. It appears right now that the application in question has a hard limit of 32,000 changes per month (ouch). Consider that Comair runs 1,100 flights a day and there are usually 3 crew members on each aircraft. A big storm like this can cause problems for days after the snow stops falling. That's a whole lot of crew changes.
In Comair's defense, this has never happened before and is unlikely to happen again. The crew system was already on the chopping block long before this incident, with its replacement scheduled to go live in January. If this freak storm had happened a month later, this likely never would have occurred.
More confirming details from the Cincinatti Enquirer:
ERLANGER - The technology was working on borrowed time. And on a frigid Christmas Eve, time ran out.When Comair's crew-scheduling computer system failed, it caused a crisis that grounded the airline's 1,160 daily flights during one of the busiest travel times of the year.
The computer failure and Midwest storm disrupted travel for more than 100,000 holiday travelers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and dozens of airports around the country.
The grounding was a public relations disaster not only for Comair but for parent Delta Air Lines. It took four days for Comair to get all its jets back in the air, and about that long to clear the piles of luggage and passengers stranded at the airport here.
And now, a federal investigation is under way.
One week after the fleet was grounded, the probe is just beginning. Comair officials initially said that no one could have prepared for the unprecedented chain of events that occurred. But interviews with dozens of company workers, the computer system manufacturer and outside technology experts raise questions about why an aging computer system was still in use - and why its backup failed as well.
It get's better:
However, it was considered state-of-the-art, experts and Jepperson officials say. Still, it could handle only 32,767 transactions in a month. A "transaction" is counted each time a change or new entry is made to crew schedules. Count limits were common when the system was purchased because computer memory was expensive - something that's no longer true.Last week, the system was already near its memory limit, and the end of the month was still a week away. When the storm hit, it caused a huge spike in crew schedule changes. The system worked until it reached its limit on Christmas Eve. Then it simply refused to take more data.
Jepperson spokesman Mike Pound says six SBS advisers worked via phone and online with Comair tech workers in Erlanger throughout the night and came up with a time-intensive solution: Rebuilding the system from scratch in a "fresh computing environment."
"At about 6 a.m. Christmas morning, that re-entry began, but unfortunately it wasn't something that could be done quickly," Pound says.
Comair had no choice but to shut down the airline while the system was rebuilt. Last Sunday, the day after Christmas and typically one of the busiest travel days of the year, only about 15 percent of the company's flights were in the air. Comair didn't fully recover until Wednesday....
Another key question about the week's events is what happened to the backup system. Jepperson spokesman Pound referred questions to Comair, which would not comment.
"If they didn't have something in place when it happened to fix it, it was already too late," says Ellis Johnson, a Georgia Tech industrial and systems engineering professor with extensive experience in airline crew computer programming. "Something like this can't be done on the fly. And it makes no sense that there was no recovery or redundant systems."
Adds Anbil of OHM Technologies: "That is what is blowing everybody's mind - what happened to the backup in the first place. Nobody goes completely down like that without backup."
The need for quality software still by far exceeds the world supply. Unfortunately for all the unemployed software engineers out there, focus on quarterly profits still gives most companies sticker shock.
Posted by Mike at 11:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)
December 15, 2004
Content is King
Flush with cash from it's skyrocketing stock price, Google is betting big on something that most bloggers, radio stations, and television broadcasters have known. It can be just as profitable to give your valuable digital content away for free, and attract such a large audience that you can sell enough advertising to eclipse what you might get by charging a fee to access it. If only newspapers, online classifieds, or personals web sites would learn the same lesson.
Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, announced an agreement yesterday with Oxford University and some of the leading U.S. research libraries to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties.
The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.
Democracy and Information
Google, newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer, has agreed to underwrite the projects announced yesterday while also adding its own technical capabilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands a pages a day at each library.Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at US$10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict that the project could take at least a decade.
Posted by Mike at 09:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 09, 2004
Will wikis replace commercial collaboration software?
From a large technology company's web site:
Wiki (pronounced "wicky" or "weeky") is server software that allows users to create and edit Web content using any browser. It was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, a programmer who named it after the Hawaiian word for quick.The largest wiki site is Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia with articles contributed, corrected, and updated by its users. It recently topped one million articles. Its English language version alone has 350,000 pages – three times as many as the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica. More than 25,000 contributors have written or edited at least 10 articles.
There are many others. There are wiki cookbooks, dictionaries and collections of quotations. Teachers use wikis to stimulate discussion. Software developers have used them to create online manuals. Like familiar Internet publishing tools, wiki uses HTML and supports hyperlinks. But unlike traditionally produced pages, wiki Web pages may be edited by anyone with access to them. Users are free to add, delete, and amend content, and even reorganize pre-existing content, regardless of who originally created the pages. Think of it as open source editing. In many respects, it's even more open than Linux. Wiki engines use plain language and don't require programming skills or special training. And, unlike Linux, changes are put into effect almost immediately, without the wait or approval required for inclusion in the next Linux kernel. Given the inherent openness of wiki pages, they are vulnerable to vandalism and spam, but abuses have been rare and tend to be short-lived because an uneditable document history can be used to quickly restore the page to an earlier state and offending users can be banned.
An analyst from tech consultants Frost and Sullivan said the market for Internet collaborative applications reached $472 million last year. Frost and Sullivan forecasts the market to grow to $3 billion by 2010.
Wikis are still below the radar of most companies. But just as instant messaging's earliest adopters were consumers, this technology could be readily adopted by businesses of all sizes. The security vulnerabilities of open-to-all wiki sites can be obviated by placing sites behind company firewalls and restricting access with employee- or team-specific criteria.
Some companies, such as the Walt Disney Company and Motorola, are already using wikis. In September 2004, Microsoft introduced a wiki authoring tool called FlexWiki, which runs on its .NET platform. It is even sharing FlexWiki's source code with developers and customers participating in its "shared source" initiative. This is Microsoft's third limited release of source code this year. The company hopes developers given access to the source code of some .NET applications will be less attracted to work with apps using Java and other open standards.
Wikis have the potential to dampen the demand for [proprietary] messaging and collaboration software for large enterprises and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). While they may not offer all the features that [proprietary] software does, open source wikis are, or soon may be, good enough for many businesses.
Posted by Mike at 12:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 19, 2004
Will we be coding in Chinese?
One interesting thing that has always struck me about computer programming is that despite the international nature of the computer and software industries, high level languages are written for the most part in English. As far as I am aware. Assembler opcodes are short for english words, too, even if the acronyms are fairly useless and hard to remember. Anyways, I am curious if the next major high level language will be written in English, or if it will be written in Hindi or Chinese? Both major Chinese languages are written the same, and the Chinese economy is booming. I give China the edge. On the bright side, with the increase in use of Unicode, and the one character per word structure of Chinese, I suppose we can look forward to much more efficient source code in the near future. I'm sure there will probably be some kind of translating compilers, if there are not already for high level languages in English, but still.
Today I was on a panel at a JETRO conference with Hong Liang Lu. He has some amazing numbers about telephones China. Chinese are buying 90M new mobile phones a year. (Compared to 80M total mobile phones in Japan.) Japanese are about to make pre-paid mobile phone illegal because they are being used in crime. 80% of Chinese cell phones are pre-paid because of collection issues. PHS (Personal Handy Phone) which was developed in Japan (and I thought was a dead standard) is heavily deployed in China with 70M subscribers vs. only 5M subscribers in Japan. Minutes are as cheap as 1 cent per minute in China. China has 300M land-line phones and 300M mobile phones now.I knew telecom was going crazy in China, and many of you may know these numbers, but they are stunning none the less.
Posted by Mike at 04:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 17, 2004
UNIX hack
Who needs an MRTG tool to monitor performance, when you can just type:
echo "load average every fifteen minutes" > /path/load.txt
echo "0,15,30,45 * * * * uptime >> /path/load.txt" > cron.txt
crontab /path/cron.txt
Seems to be working so far. Also seems that I need to upgrade my CPU.
Posted by Mike at 03:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
August 03, 2004
Will Cloudscape aka Derby replace MySQL?
The footprint size in particular caught my attention:
IBM to Release Java Database to Open-Source GroupCharlie Garry, senior program director of database research for the Meta Group Inc., said that the move was particularly interesting in terms of licensing. Handing it over to Apache is a much more hands-off move than what Computer Associates Inc. did in terms of custom-licensing its recently open-sourced Ingres database, for example, and differs from MySQL's modified GPL license, which basically dictates that projects written on top of MySQL either be open source or that developers pay for a full license.
"[That's] quite different in terms of a statement of support for open source coming from IBM than even what CA has done with Ingres or even what MySQL has done," said Garry, in Simsbury, Conn. "[Apache is] a pure support model. Their hope is it becomes a ubiquitous standard in the types of embedded applications it would be appropriate for, and they'll make some money on support of it. Which is better than what they're making now, which is nothing.
"It's in stark contrast to what MySQL has done," he said. "They're increasingly becoming much more commercial. It's all or nothing with them. For a great many companies, that's unacceptable. [MySQL] continuously has to backpedal and issue [license] exceptions and so forth. I just think ultimately the GPL license is going to prove too restrictive as this market gets competitive."
Cloudscape is embedded in some 70 IBM applications, including Workplace, WebSphere Portal and WebSphere Application Server. It has a 2MB footprint and is fully transactional, fully embeddable and requires no database administration support.
IBM plans to release a commercial version of Cloudscape to partners and customers later this year. It will be based on the same technology as the Apache code and will be updated with changes brought forth by the development community.
IBM has made a binary copy of Derby available at www.developerworks.com. Over the coming weeks, the code will be downloadable from Apache.org.
MySQL uses at least 50MB on my server, even if it's not being actively used, and you have to use phpMyAdmin for most things, or else use line commands. I don't have a problem with MySQL, but will be interested to see what happens.
Posted by Mike at 02:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 21, 2004
UNIX and C all thanks to regulation?
When George W. Bush goes on and on about how government shouldn't stifle corporate interests, and Republicans in congress move to extended copyrights even longer on everything from mix tapes to fairytales, here is a sobering reminder that if it weren't for government regulation and government imposition on a private company to make it's copyrighted work publicly available, we might all still be writing code in Fortran. Well, maybe not, but we might just be starting to talk about this "radical" technology called the internet.
Unix's founding fathersAnother factor helped the duo of C and Unix to spread much faster than they otherwise would have. AT&T was required under the terms of a 1958 court order in an antitrust case to license its non-telephone-related technology to anyone who asked. And so Unix and C were distributed, mostly to universities, for only a nominal fee. When one considers the ineptness of AT&T's later attempts to commercialise Unix—after the court order ceased to be applicable because of another antitrust case which broke up AT&T in 1984—this restriction, an accidental boost to what would later become known as the open-source movement, becomes even more crucial.
The later history of Unix is convoluted, and indeed has again become mired in court battles. Following its origins at Bell Labs, a competing version sprang up at the University of California, Berkeley, which first released its version of Unix in 1977, under the leadership of a graduate student named Bill Joy, who later went on to found Sun Microsystems. Ideological battles raged between adherents of the two versions of Unix through much of the 1980s.
To an extent, this rivalry was stripped of relevance by an unexpected entrant. In 1991, an obscure university student in Finland, Linus Torvalds, announced a project to write a new, open-source clone of Unix from scratch—what has come to be known as Linux. That someone would seek to do this is a testament to the high regard in which programmers hold the achievement of the Bell Labs group. Dr Ritchie, in return, expresses a high regard for Linux, attributing its success to the fact that it was a unified effort, at a time when other competing versions of Unix were mired in legal battles.
Linux is also the true heir of the Unix tradition in the sense that its development process is collaborative. Dr Pike says that the thing he misses most from the 1970s at Bell Labs was the terminal room. Because computers were rare at the time, people did not have them on their desks, but rather went to the room, one side of which was covered with whiteboards, and sat down at a random computer to work. The technical hub of the system became the social hub.
It is that interplay between the technical and the social that gives both C and Unix their legendary status. Programmers love them because they are powerful, and they are powerful because programmers love them. David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale, perhaps put it best when he said, “Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defence against complexity.” Dr Ritchie's creations are indeed beautiful examples of that most modern of art forms.
Posted by Mike at 01:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
July 16, 2004
SCO gives up on software, targets the auto industry
Here's an update on SCO's downward spiral from eWeek:
A federal judge on Monday denied AutoZone's request to transfer its copyright case with The SCO Group from Nevada to a Memphis, Tenn., court, but he also granted a limited stay to the auto parts chain....AutoZone borrowed SCO's own reasoning when it later asked for a stay in its case pending the resolution of SCO's cases with IBM as well as with Red Hat and Novell.
In SCO's own attempt to stay its case with Red Hat, it said "there is no doubt" that the IBM case will resolve threshold issues in the Red Hat case....
AutoZone, which trades on Nasdaq and is a Fortune 500 member, was the first Linux-using company sued by SCO after the Unix company had long promised that it would target Linux end-users in its legal fight against Linux.
AutoZone had used SCO's OpenServer Unix until 2001, when it started to switch over to Red Hat Linux. AutoZone completed its migration to Linux in 2002.
Lindon, Utah-based SCO immediately followed the AutoZone lawsuit by suing DaimlerChrysler AG in a Michigan state court both on Linux grounds and for Unix contract violations.
Posted by Mike at 12:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
April 05, 2004
What do SCO and George W Bush have in common?
Neither can admit it, even when they're proven wrong:
SCO's failing case against IBMBy Bruce Perens
SCO suddenly isn't faring so well in its lawsuit against IBM.
The company recently dropped claims that Big Blue had misappropriated its trade-secrets by placing them in Linux. This leaves the SCO argument resting upon two copyright infringement claims.
When IBM began building the AIX Unix system, it purchased a license from AT&T, the company that created Unix. AT&T's Unix business was later sold to Novell, which subsequently sold part of that business to SCO.
SCO subsequently contended that under the terms of the Unix license, any software written by IBM and then added to AIX would automatically become SCO's property. In other words, it could not legally be added to Linux.It is not a new argument.
In 1985, concerned Unix customers asked AT&T to clarify that particular term of the license. AT&T agreed and published the license change in the Echo newsletter that got sent to all Unix licensees in August of that year.
Explaining the change, AT&T wrote that the sentence was added to assure licensees that the company would claim no ownership in the software that they developed--only the portion of the software developed by AT&T.
SCO is legally bound to honor the contract and publicly stated interpretation of AT&T's terms. SCO conveniently overlooked this change when it decided to sue IBM. As AT&T's successor in interest, SCO is legally bound to honor the contract and publicly stated interpretation of AT&T's terms. That's why I think SCO's major claim against IBM and Linux will fail. The remaining copyright infringement claim is that Linux makes use of the Unix API (application program interface), and that copies of several header files defining that API were included in Linux.
SCO should know there is ample case law asserting that APIs can't be restricted and are available for all to implement under "fair use" in copyright law. But even if such precedent did not exist, the Unix definition still can't be claimed as SCO's property. When Novell exited the Unix business, it transferred the Unix API, definition, and trademark to The Open Group, (http://www.opengroup.org/austin/papers/single_unix_faq.html), which maintains it today as their Single Unix specification.
SCO was only sold some rights to the Unix implementation. The Open Group asserts that anyone can implement the Unix API without any copyright encumbrance. So much for SCO's remaining copyright infringement claim.
And if for some reason all this was not sufficient, there is yet more evidence to prove the Unix API has been released for unencumbered implementation on four other occasions related to standards organizations. What's more, lawyers can point to a previous court case , as well as the release by Caldera, which now calls itself SCO, of old Unix code under an open-source license in 2002. SCO has watched its stock soar from 50 cents to over $20 while making claims that now appear dubious. More recently, SCO told the court that it could not show the court what code is infringing until its lawyers are allowed to go through the AIX source code. This is because SCO claims IBM's work on AIX as its own, but has never seen that work.
Posted by Mike at 09:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 13, 2004
Microsoft joins the open source movement
As a programmer by profession, I realize this is really not funny, but I just could not pass up the chance to use that title:
Various computer security firms were reporting on Friday that two compressed files - one at 203 megabytes and another at 229 megabytes of Windows NT and Windows 2000 operating systems - were being widely distributed on scores of online exchanges.Security officials said the compressed files amounted to a CD-Rom's worth of data and represented less than five percent of Windows code. However, they warned it may relate critical security functions.
"I do not believe Microsoft would have issued a public statement if the source code for solitaire had been released," said Starnes.
The concern is that in the wrong hands, virus writers and hackers could discover vulnerabilities in the software and use it to break into PCs running on Windows 2000 or NT to destroy or steal data.
Microsoft on Thursday was quick to dismiss this as unlikely, but that hasn't stopped Internet users from downloading the files.
Posted by Mike at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
February 03, 2004
With a name like Darl
This guy cracks me up. Is he an idiot, delusional, or both? You be the judge:
The SCO Group took its intellectual property challenge of Linux to Harvard on Monday and received a cold reception from area students opposed to the company's legal tactics.In a presentation hosted by the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology on Monday, Darl McBride, SCO president and CEO, and Chris Sontag, senior vice president and SCOsource general manager, defended their decision to pursue corporations and users who violate what they consider their intellectual property.
The presentation, called "Defending Intellectual Property Rights in a Digital Age," outlined the company's decision to sue IBM (Quote, Chart) for copyright infringement. Last March, officials at the Lindon, Utah, software company filed a $3 billion lawsuit saying Big Blue programmers lifted thousands of lines of code from licensed Unix System V code and used them to bolster the Linux kernel.
A hearing is scheduled for Friday in Utah, where SCO lawyers will press IBM to release its AIX code for review by the company. Last month, the federal judge presiding over the lawsuit ruled SCO must show all the code under contention before IBM is required to show its own code. If SCO doesn't provide all the code in question, Judge Brooke Wells ruled, a suspension on all fact-finding evidence would be suspended....
One student, who said he distributed copies of Linux outside the hall, offered to hand out more after the talks. Another asked why SCO refrained from publicizing the code they claim is infringing, so the Linux community could gut the code from the kernel and move forward without risk of violating copyrights.
McBride said that while Linux is the compilation of thousands of people donating their time and programming skills to improve kernel code created by Linus Torvalds, SCO deserves compensation for the improvements it made to Linux. Without the illegal use of SCO's code, he said, Linux isn't an attractive option anymore for high-end servers.
It get's better!
At one point, McBride, explaining what he thinks is the Linux community's efforts to damage SCO through Web site attacks, asked a student whether he was affected by the MyDoom.A e-mail virus, which targeted Outlook and Outlook Express users and installed malicious code used to launch a massive distributed denial of service attack (define).The attack, which began over the weekend and culminated Sunday, swamped SCO's home page domain name and forced the company to move it to another Monday morning.
When asked the question, the student replied with a hint of humor in his tone: "No, I have Linux."
Posted by Mike at 01:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
October 10, 2003
The death of the internet?
In a speech given to the New America Foundation, Democratic appointed FCC Commissioner Copps explains how corporate interests could undermine the open internet infrastructure that we have all learned to depend on, by changing the rules to allow for tighter control of profits - in effect setting up a series of toll booths on the information superhighway. Disturbing stuff.
Posted by Mike at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
September 28, 2003
Linus Torvalds' interview with the NY Times
Is file-sharing, which has the recording industry so up in arms, the ''dark side'' of open-source attitudes?Sharing is certainly not bad in itself. In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved. What the recording industry is so worried about is obviously something totally different -- the ''sharing'' of stuff that isn't yours to share in the first place.
O.K. So what are your views on sharing music files?
I don't actually think about it much; I listen to the radio if I listen to music. What I do find interesting is how the file-sharing thing ends up changing how people think about computers and copyright law. Some of it is a bit scary: just the fact that your question equated sharing with something bad is a pretty scary statement in itself. What also bothers me is the apparent dishonesty of especially the R.I.A.A., claiming that file-sharing is destroying their business and that they are losing billions of dollars on it. There's been a number of studies done, and it looks like the major reason for the dip in CD sales ends up being lack of interest in the music produced. And let's face it -- how many boy bands can you try to sell before your revenues start dipping?
...People position you as the nemesis to Bill Gates. He started Microsoft and you started Linux, the big competition to Microsoft's dominance of operating systems. Is that an unfair or inaccurate characterization?
The thing is, at least to me personally, Microsoft just isn't relevant to what I do. That might sound strange, since they are clearly the dominant player in the market that Linux is in, but the thing is: I'm not in the ''market.'' I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the ''evil Microsoft empire.'' Quite the reverse, in fact: from a technology angle, Microsoft really has been one of the least interesting companies. So I've never seen it as a ''Linus versus Bill'' thing. I just can't see myself in the position of the nemesis, since I just don't care enough. To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
Posted by Mike at 06:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)