Boston to Manchester by rail

They were talking about it on NHPR this morning.  They are spending taxpayer money on a "study".  They hope the study will be convincing enough to gain them federal funding.  Greenies love rail, they think it's low carbon.  They also love the money that rail projects soak up.  They estimated that 31,000 passengers a year would ride a Boston to Manchester train. 
   On an emotional level, I like it.  I'm a rail fan from way back, I have an HO model railroad in my guest room.  On an economic basis, it's craziness.  Right now, travelers from Boston to Manchester drive.  It's only 53 miles on I93.  Takes about an hour by my reckoning, and only 55 minutes by Google maps reckoning.  And there is bus service, takes about an hour 20 minutes and costs $18. 
   Rail would have to compete, in speed and cost to be worth the sizable money fixing up the track would cost.  The land is hilly and the existing track, all laid down in the 19th century, is curvy, which limits speed. Buying a brand new ultra straight right of way would cost maybe $10 million a mile, for 53 miles, or $530 million.  Which is probably out of the question.  Especially  for a mere 31,000 passengers.  Figure a fare of somewhat more than the bus, say $25.  That makes farebox revenue for a year $775000, and it takes 683 years to pay off  the bonds.  No can do.
   So the project has to run over existing right of way, of which there are plenty.  Much of it has been abandoned, or turned into bike trails, but some still works.  Bring the track and roadbed up to 19th century standards and the trains could surely do 60 mph, but probably not more than 100 mph.  Trains don't corner as well as cars.  So that makes the train trip somewhere between half an hour and a hour.  On the Boston end, it has to connect with the T, and it ought to have a station on 128.  Assume fixing up the track is a mere $1 million a mile, so we put $53 million into track work   At that rate the fares will pay off the bonds in a mere 68 years, assuming ALL the fare goes to baying off the bonds, with nothing for maintenance, keeping the culverts clear, buying diesel fuel, plowing the snow, paying the trainmen, buying rolling stock.  And assuming the bonds are zero interest.  At 5%,  a 68 year $53 million bond will require $147 million to pay off. 
   For the taxpayer, this isn't just a bad deal, it's a swindle. 

Filling Steve Jobs' shoes at Apple

Wall St Journal ran a nice long piece about Apple's new president, Tim Cook.  Needless to say, Mr. Cook is having a spot of bother filling in for Steve Jobs.  According to the Journal, Tim is cutting the mustard, but it's hard work.  They go on to talk about management styles, clothing styles, hair styles, and other fluff 'n stuff.
It is a full page piece, with photographs. 
   Not once does the Journal talk about how Jobs built Apple into what it is today.  Jobs could envision a new product, get it designed, get it into production, get it out to market.  And Jobs' products sold, like hot cakes.  Apple II, Macintosh, Ipod, Iphone, Ipad,  every one of them was new, nothing like it on the market, priced right, low enough to sell, high enough to turn a profit.  Good styling.  The right functions.  Not since Thomas Edison has one man  put out so many brand new products. 
    The real question us readers have, is "Can Tim Cook bring another successful new Apple product to market?"  This Journal piece didn't even attempt to answer that question. 

BitCoin gets bit

Mt Gox, the leading Bitcoin exchange announced they have been robbed.  $470 million worth of Bitcoin was stolen.  Mt. Gox halted customer withdrawals, and has filed for bankruptcy in Japan.  Mt. Gox claims that bugs in the Bitcoin programming allowed "unauthorized withdrawals".
   Wow.  Just how do you steal a Bitcoin?  And, surely each Bitcoin has a serial number.  Why cannot Mt. Gox  put out the word that Bitcoins serial numbers thus and thus and thus are stolen and not to be honored anywhere?   And since Bitcoins are a pure software concept, why cannot Mt. Gox's computers simply gin up enough Bitcoin to cover their obligations? 
   And what does one do with a stolen Bitcoin?  Surely you cannot hide it under a mattress. 
  

The Forty Knot Sailboat wins the America's Cup

Years ago I read "The Forty Knot Sailboat".  The author  described a large sailboat equipped with hydrofoils.  These underwater wings would lift the entire boat out of the water, vastly reducing drag and enabling ice boat like speeds.  Ice boats can do 100 miles an hour because the friction of the runners is zip, and doesn't rise with speed.  Whereas the friction and wave drag on a hull in the water is high, and goes up by the square of the speed.  But  once a boat is up on hydrofoils, planing,  friction drag drops off, form drag goes away and fantastic speeds become possible.  The author foresaw sailing yachts fast enough to outrun bad weather.  It all seemed like science fiction at the time.  In those days sailboats were made of wood, lines were manila fiber, dacron sails were just coming in. 
   Fast forward to the 21st century, 2013.  The America's cup, currently in possession of the Americans (again) is facing a challenge from New Zealand.   Larry Ellison of Oracle is defending the cup in San Francisco bay.  The cup defender is a huge catamaran, all carbon fiber, 72 feet long and carrying a 131 foot mast (that's better than twelve stories tall).  It's got hydrofoils, and with the right wind, it's been clocked at 55 miles per hour (48 knots) .  That's freeway speed, and it's done under sail. 
   Trouble is, hot as the Oracle boat was, the Kiwis kept beating it.  This year it takes winning nine races, match races, just two boats.  The Kiwis had won eight straight and one more win would give them the cup.  Up to this point, the Oracle crew had been sailing in accordance with computer simulations.  Oracle being a software house, I dare say every single programmer in the company  was working on America's Cup programs.  And, all the software had favored a strategy of pointing.  This is one strategy for going to windward.  You point the boat up into the wind as high as she will go, until the sail begins to luff  (flap).  This is the closest to a straight line course, and the boat gets to the windward mark by covering the shortest distance on the water. 
   The other strategy is footing.  You bear off a touch and get the sails really full of wind.  You go faster thru the water, but you have to cover more distance since you aren't going as directly to the windward mark.  For the crucial ninth race, the Oracle team decided upon footing instead of the pointing recommended by all the computers.  All, wonder of wonders, the extra speed footing gives was enough to get the boat up on foils, vastly increasing its speed.  The Oracle team came from behind, won the next nine races and kept the America's Cup in America. 

Kerry tours the Sunday TV news

I saw Kerry on Meet the Press and later this morning on Face The Nation.  He might have done some other shows too.  The administration is using TV appearances to show concern for the Ukraine situation.  Kerry clearly disapproves of Putin invading Ukraine, but other than outrage, he didn't speak of doing anything about it.  Probably 'cause Obama doesn't want to do anything, and we haven't been able to talk the Europeans into backing up any economic sanctions against the Russians.   The Europeans are afraid to say "boo", lest the Russians turn off their gas and let them all freeze in the dark.  

Kiss your Windows XP goodby

That's what Microsoft is saying.  Support for XP goes away next month, April 14.  This probably isn't the end of the world.  In the 14 years XP has been in service you would think that they had patched most, perhaps even all, of the serious security holes.  Certainly I haven't been receiving many patches in the last few months. 
  Microsoft officially recommends upgrade to the latest version, Windows 8.  They do admit that Windows 8 is a bigger ramhog and runs slower and to compensate for fatter slower Windows 8, Microsoft suggests you buy a new computer, with incredible amounts of RAM and a 1 gigahertz processor.   As far as I know, Windows 8 doesn't offer anything that XP doesn't have, except touch screen support, which is cool if you have a touch screen, but few XP machines do.  
   I plan to keep running my trusty 9 year old Compaq tower machine.  With XP it's faster than my children's laptops running Win 7 and 8.  It  surfs the web, runs all my CAD programs, supports Microsoft C and Quickbasic.  The children sneer at it, 'cause it won't run their games fast enough, but I'm not a gamer so I don't care. 
   XP is fairly reliable.  It's been a long time since I had a blue screen of death.  I still have programs lock up, but XP is still alive and can shut the offending program down. 

Targeting Target

Target Stores took a tremendous hit when hackers broke into company computers and stole the identities and credit card numbers of zillions of customers.  Certainly I will think twice before shopping at Target. 
  Little has been released about how they did it.  But it appears the bad guys infected the "point of sale" equipment (jargon for cash register).  The malware skimmed off the credit card info right at the scanner, before it was encrypted.
   Question:  How do you infect a cash register with malware?   Needless to say just about everything electronic has a microprocessor inside these days.  They work off programs stored in memory.  Understand that computer memory, random access memory (RAM) is volatile.  When the power goes off, it forgets everything.  An infection cannot survive living in RAM.  It must work its way into non-volatile storage.  In the good old days, devices like cash registers kept their programs in Programmable Read Only Memory, PROMS for short.  PROMS were cheap and very dependable and best of all, they could not be written in circuit.  Only special test equipment, PROM programmers, could write into PROMS.  The only way to change programs burned into PROM was for a tech to open the device casework, remove the old PROM and insert a new PROM.  You ain't going to pull off that stunt over the Internet.  I suppose the bad guys could have infiltrated Target after closing hours (does Target ever close?)  and rework all the cash registers.  Does not sound likely to me.
   And, technology moves on.  They invented the Electrically Eraseable PROM, EEPROM which can be reprogrammed in circuit.  Production loved them.  They used to buy blank PROMS, keep them in the stockroom, program batches of them, get the programmed ones stuffed into boards as opposed to blank ones.   Blank PROMs look just like programmed PROMS after all.  And make sure the right version of the program is in the PROM.  With EEPROMs all these possibilities of error go away.  Just stuff the board and solder it, then program the EEPROM in circuit.  And with EEPROMS we now have the possibility of changing the program in the cash register without laying a hand on it.  Assuming the cash register make was stupid enough to allow reprogramming of his product in the field.  There are plenty of ways to disable the programming capability before you ship the product. 
    Presumable the bad guys infected Target's central computers, the ones in finance and the stockroom that talk to the cash registers and total up dollar volume of sales and keep track of inventory so they can reorder product as it sells out.  And somehow the central computers infected the cash registers, by sending new programming out over the wire to the checkout counters. Had Target been more security minded they would not have allowed the central computers to talk to the cash registers.  Just listening is enough to make the system work. 
   I assume the Target people are hard at work securing things.  I haven't heard that they had succeeded yet.