Time to moveon from Windows. Financial Express:
Spyware, code that allows outsiders to monitor computer activity, now affects about 90 percent of computers, he said.
?It?s not just an annoyance,? George said. ?Increasingly, it?s becoming more and more pernicious. It can degrade a system?s performance to the point of being unusable, it can block access to the Internet, it can prevent you from accessing e-mail (and) it can redirect your browser to some other home page.?
?And we?re sitting there amazed throughout the 1960s. We were amazed because our country was going from Walt Disney and von Braun talking about it?all the way to a plan to land a man on the Moon?Wow!?
The right to dream
But as a kid back then, Rutan continued, the right to dream of going to the Moon or into space was reserved for only ?professional astronauts? ? an enormously dangerous and expensive undertaking.
Over the decades, Rutan said, despite the promise of the Space Shuttle to lower costs of getting to space, a kid?s hope of personal access to space in their lifetime remained in limbo.
?Look at the progress in 25 years of trying to replace the mistake of the shuttle. It?s more expensive?not less?a horrible mistake,? Rutan said. ?They knew it right away. And they?ve spent billions?arguably nearly $100 billion over all these years trying to sort out how to correct that mistake?trying to solve the problem of access to space. The problem is?it?s the government trying to do it.?
I believe Rutan is correct. Government should generally provide incentives for private industry to address problems that we as a society believe need attention. Examples include: broadband (true 2 way), education, energy and space exploration.
John Dvorak on Microsoft’s weekly software patches and his recommendation to stop using the bugged and exploited Internet explorer browser (and swith to Mozilla Firefox or Opera, or better yet, get a mac)
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Bill Gates says that the problem with Internet Explorer is that users (us) download 3rd party software…..!
Way to go, Burt Rutan & the folks at scaled!
Here’s a useful question for all of our federal candidates: Why not save the billions we’re spending on the antique space shuttles and redirect it to math & science education. It’s clear that the era of hugely expensive manned flight is nearing an end.
Video…. Alan Boyle | Clusty | Google | Teoma | Yahoo
Bryan Bell has posted some gorgeous images from Monday’s flight.
WTN’s recently released report [5.6MB PDF]includes these highlights:
- Academic research and development activities in Wisconsin total about $883 million in the latest year. That includes the UW System, the Medical College of Wisconsin, other private colleges and universities, the Marshfield Clinic?s research arm and the research programs of the Veterans Administration hospitals.
- Academic R&D is responsible for more than 31,000 jobs, directly and indirectly, in Wisconsin. That is according to an economic multiplier used by the U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Association of American Universities.
- Academic R&D represents an area where Wisconsin performs well versus other states in attracting federal dollars. Wisconsin is 15th nationally, even without the inclusion of the Marshfield Clinic and the Veterans Hospitals.
- Academic R&D in Wisconsin has continued to grow, even as the economy retrenched in 2000-2003. In the last year alone, for example, R&D conducted in the UW System grew by $47.5 million.
- Academic R&D in Wisconsin could be at risk unless state support for the infrastructure supporting such research is maintained. Other states are investing in their infrastructure because they believe it makes sound economic sense.
The report contains these recommendations:
- The governor and Legislature should continue to invest in capital improvement programs such as BioStar and HealthStar, which leverage the assets of the UW-Madison and help to create spinout companies and jobs.
- The governor and Legislature should begin, in the 2005-2007 state budget, the process of restoring state support for UW System operations. Although many states have experienced similar budget difficulties, the erosion in the UW budget has been relatively steady for years and cannot continue if the state wants to protect its investment.
- The governor and Legislature should create a Wisconsin Innovation and Research Fund to help secure federal and corporate grants by providing small matching grants to UW System and private college faculty who collaborate with business on R&D.
- The UW-Madison, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Marshfield Clinic should re-examine already strong collaborative research relationships to look for more opportunities to joint attract research funding and conduct science. Incentives to conduct inter-institution and interdisciplinary research should be established. This is similar to an approach being followed in Minnesota, where the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic have recently announced joint initiatives.
- The governor and the Legislature should establish a commission, similar to the Michigan Commission on Higher Education and Economic Growth, to explore other options and to more deliberately track ?best practices? in other states.
Judy Newman interviewed local scientists, along with other interested parties.
I continue to believe the primary issue for us is not money, rather risk taking. We’ve certainly spent a great deal of academic research, only to see WARF license the technology to firms such as California based Geron, among other non Wisconsin entities.
These licensing activities beg the usual question: why should the taxpayers continue to pay when the fruits go elsewhere, similar to the long time discussion of our brain drain (two of my four UW roommates are in Colorado and California….)?
My View: Why spend more taxpayer money when we don’t capitalize on what we have now! I can’t imagine yet another government level technology council….
UPDATE: Tom Still (Report Editor and President of the WTN) sent me a followup email:
Jim — Thank you! It’s good to get the information out and let people debate how to set priorities. I appreciate your thoughtful approach.
— Tom
Send him yours: tstill at wisconsintechnologycouncil.com
Kudos to Bert Rutan and company on their successful flight today. Xeni Jardin has more.
Hanover, N.H.-based Dartmouth College is well-known in wireless circles for being one of the first colleges to embrace Wi-Fi technology. Recently, the college went through a network upgrade.
The original network, says Brad Noblet, Dartmouth director of technical services, cost $1.2 million. That covered 200 access points (APs) and the wiring they required. “Now we want to go to 1,500 APs.”
But that’s not all. The original Cisco APs were 802.11b only, and now the college wants to serve 802.11a, b, and g, using Aruba 52 APs.
Of course, the college doesn’t sell wireless, so that’s not the problem. “People on the campus love wireless. The challenge is capacity,” explains Noblet.
These are heavy users. Students do language lab classes from their own room using video over IP, for example, and Noblet admits that heavy use of video on the network presents a real capacity challenge.
Or – why we should stop protecting the incumbent telcos (SBC)
Daniel Berninger:
The $3 billion dollar budget at Bell Laboratories did not include a single project addressing the use of data networks to transport voice when VocalTec Communications released InternetPhone in February 1995. As of 2004, every project at the post-divestiture AT&T Labs and Lucent Technologies Bell Labs reflects the reality of voice over Internet Protocol. Every major incumbent carrier, and the largest cable television providers, in the United States has announced a VoIP program. And even as some upstart carriers have used VoIP to lower telephony prices dramatically, even more radical innovators threaten to lower the cost of a phone call to zero?to make it free.
The VoIP insurrection over the last decade marks a milestone in communication history no less dramatic than the arrival of the telephone in 1876. We know data networks and packetized voice will displace the long standing pre-1995 world rooted in Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. It remains uncertain whether telecom’s incumbent carriers and equipment makers will continue to dominate or even survive as the information technology industry absorbs voice as a simple application of the Internet.
Across the United States, towns and cities dissatisfied with data services provided by the private sector are now delivering high-speed connectivity to the doorstep, often at lower prices.
In the process, however, municipalities are facing increasingly fierce opposition from cable operators and telecommunications companies unhappy with the competition. In some cases, cable companies and telcos are fighting to bar utilities entirely from providing broadband in the future.
Special Partner Promotion
Note that our current slow “broadband” providers are lagging the world in costs and speed. Much like roads, sewer and water, fiber networks should be a public good (transport only) while others provide services on those very fast networks.
John Perry Barlow comments on this. Robert Berger also has some useful notes vis a vis widespread free WiFi deployments. Doc Searls offers some useful notes on the “lame” broadband services available today.
Governments should be paying attention as their POTS (plain old telephone system) tax revenue will rapidly diminish over the next 5 years. Telephone calls have declined 50% since 1997.
Nancy Gohring:
The University of Georgia?s New Media Consortium recently conducted a study examining large Wi-Fi deployments in the United States: The study differentiates between what it calls Wi-Fi clouds, which have continuous coverage and Wi-Fi zones, which offer interrupted coverage. The researchers found 38 clouds and 16 zones. The study examines who owns the networks and what the owners hope to gain from building the networks. It?s a thorough report on the intentions of hotspot builders today.
The next step will be trying to figure out if the intentions of hotspot network developers are being met. For example, 43 percent of cloud developers cited stimulating economic development as a motivating factor for building the network. But it?s not clear if large Wi-Fi networks in small towns actually succeed in stimulating economic development
With respect to economic development, my view is that we need to, somehow, as fast as possible, offer true, economic bi-directional high speed internet to all Badger resident (speeds 20x+ faster than current rather slow “broadband” services). These type of pervasive networks will support video, VOIP as well as personal web services.
