Tech

That picture of the soldiers in Iraq was hilarious, but think about how
it happened.

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It looks as though Microsoft will require the installation of their new operating system, Vista (née Longhorn), in order to run the PC version of their hit video game, Halo II. Vista has already been delayed several times and is now scheduled for release in December 2006. No independent software maker would have written the game for an OS that doesn’t yet exist. Instead, Microsoft seems to be using their application software to drive sales of their operating system software. Don’t be surprised if you see the next MS Office release “optimized” for Vista, or backward compatibility problems between Vista and older versions of Office.

This also may help explain why Microsoft released part of its Windows source code to the EU in connection with a monopoly investigation. Call me paranoid, but I suspect that parts of that source code will become obsolete.

We saw similar issues with the Sony DRM/spyware/rootkit problems. Sony is both a content provider (music and movies, CDs and DVDs) and a hardware manufacturer. One of their hardware lines is the Sony Minidisk system. The proprietary encoding software that comes with the player includes a system for counting how many times a song has been “checked out” from your hard disk to a minidisk, with the maximum set at three (net of the times it has been “checked in” and removed from a minidisk). The original version of the software and player did not allow for MP3s; the current version will play them, but cripples some of the functions available on other players.

Sony’s spyware ploy was based on the realization that the market had left their minidisk player behind, so their preferred method of controlling the spread of copied content had failed. The minidisk hardware and software were both proprietary and not adopted by other companies, with the exception of some third-party minidisk manufacturing. They were in effect trying their Betamax strategy again, and it didn’t work this time, either. Earlier attempts to restrict copying had been evaded by disabling the copy-protect function resident on the disk. Sony’s solution was to alter the user’s application software to mimic the behavior of the minidisk player. And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.

Heard about the coming age of nanobots, have you? You’ll believe it when you see it, right? Me too. However, looks the building blocks for those micromachines are up and running. Ever thought you’d see a chip-scale motor? A gear train smaller than a pinhead?

This alignment clip is used in conjunction with a transmission. This complex device is entirely batch-fabricated, with no assembly required. Amazing!
(Sandia National Laboratories)

Here’s a birds-eye overview of a chip-scale, six gear train in operation. The black, pointed objects are tiny probes applying power to the “circuit” that runs the train. The tiny semi-circle in the center is the actual gear train. The object on the right is the actuator mechanism, where electrical forces are converted to mechanical movement, which then applies the mechanical power to the gears. This is a silicon machine.

And here’s a closeup of that tiny gear train running.

Here’s a comb drive linear actuator. The basic princle is that of opposite charges attracting and like charges repelling. The actuator in the center, attached to the bottom comb, is negatively charged. When the top comb is positively charged, the bottom comb is attracted, moving towards it. When the charge is reversed, the bottom comb is pushed away. Simple, no? You can see the charge reversing by the top comb alternately lighting up and going dark.

Perhaps what’s most impressive about these machines is their manufacturability. They are made from the same materials (silicon wafers and aluminum) and the same photo-lithography techniques as the chips in your computer. Most people don’t realize (why would they?) that those microchips are not single layer devices, but complex, 3-D, multilayer stacks of silicon, conductors, and dielectrics. Imagine building complex, reliable, low power, low cost machines using the same technologies. Impressive.

There are at least three facilities pursuing MEMS (micro electromechanical machine systems) that I’m aware of: Sandia National Lab, The Applied Physics Lab and UC Berkely. Darpa is a primary funding agency.

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Groovy.

I think it’s prudent to assume that improved technology will eventually make it possible for anybody to read the encrypted documents that you send via email today. Similarly, you should probably assume that any photos in which you appear that are posted on the Web, even without captions, will eventually be searchable. (Being searchable by name is merely a matter of linking your image to one captioned photo.) Depending on the sophistication of the search algorithms and the quality of the images, this should apply to crowd photos, other people’s snapshots where you appear in the background, etc.

Search algorithms are Google’s strong point, and the Company already has a very effective text-based “Image Search” system. Improvements in that system seem certain, and I’m sure will bring widespread benefits that offset at least some of the costs. However, it’s increasingly clear that privacy as it existed before 1995 is a thing of the past.

From a business POV we are still in early days. Google reminds me of Microsoft in the early ’90s, except that I think Google has greater potential. The next few years should be interesting in many ways.

Taking a break from test-writing, I turn on C-span and hear Seymour Hersch say we will never know who killed Rafik Hariri. But I remembered the report named names. Next break, I turn to Instapundit who links this:

The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. But the undoctored version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed”.

(Ah – a certain order and clarity – for these are the President’s brother, brother-in-law & the Commander of Syrian intelligence) Of course, this has been known since Thursday and C-span taped Hersch before. But Hersch would have seemed more prescient if Annan’s editing had stood. (“The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.”) Perhaps just such moments make the UN more determined to control the net: It’s chaos when people know too much, isn’t it?