First of all, a few people have responded to me saying that I’m educating the criminals. That response was, of course, to be expected; but I don’t think it’s true. If someone wanted to know, the information is already highly available, much of it more complete than this. My target audience is the people who aren’t looking for that kind of thing–the people who actually need to know but don’t realize that there’s a problem.

While the information in the video I created was presented as a “how to” guide, my primary intention wasn’t to train people in this technique, but rather to emphasize just how easy it was to do. Many reports on the subject seem to suggest that some expertise is required: either the aid of a locksmith in creating the key, or some extra skill and expertise to make your own. My point was to show that it’s possible for anyone to make their own bump key with no real skill to speak of, no assistance, and no prior experience.

What can you do?

A number of people have asked, with this new threat, how can you keep your house safe? Unfortunately, physical security costs money. And real physical security really costs money. There are safe locks out there, but you’re not going to buy them at the hardware store. Furthermore, you’re not going to be able to get your keys duplicated by anyone but a vendor-authorized locksmith, and only after presenting proper identification and a fair amount of cash.

Some examples of these high-security locks are the higher-end Medeco locks and the Schlage primus. These locks are not only bump-resistant, but also extremely difficult (nigh impossible) to pick, even for an expert. Some locks are more resistant to bumping than others; though I’m not nearly qualified enough to give out advice about which one you should use. See the “required reading” below for better information on this subject.

Another important consideration is to not rely on just a single mechanism for your security. Locking your doors and windows is important, but you should also have a monitored alarm system, store your valuables out of sight, and don’t give thieves a reason to target you. Remember that most thieves prefer to hit the easy targets; that means they prefer houses in “safe” neighborhoods where people don’t worry about security, and particularly go for tempting opportunities, like garage doors left open.

A few people have also asked what they can do to help improve the situation, and how to help push the lock makers toward giving us better locks. I think there’s two parts to solving this issue. The first thing to do is to increase general awareness of the problem. As long as the public remains ignorant, companies like Kwikset will merrily continue to pretend that all is well; after all, these companies save a lot of research and development money this way. Tell your friends, tell your family; let everyone know. People have to understand that this is important. The second part of this solution is to let the lock making companies know in a way that they’ll listen to: your purchasing decisions. These companies are in business not to make locks, but to make money; the locks are a means to an end. When Kwikset learns that people are, in alarming numbers, willing to spend ten times as much to buy a competitor’s bump-resistant lock instead of their own classic lock, you better believe that Kwikset will start putting more money into high-security alternatives.

Did you say 10 times as much?

Yeah, that’s probably a significant detail. With locks, you often get what you pay for: a $20 lock buys you about twenty dollars worth of security. What kind of valuables are you securing? Does $20 sound like the appropriate security investment to safeguard a $300,000 home? How about $100; does that seem like the appropriate investment? Better security costs more. However, the better known a given attack vector becomes; the more it will be guarded against. And of course, the more locks guard against that attack, the cheaper it will be to find one that does.

Required Reading

I’m no authority on this subject; I can’t help you if your key doesn’t work, I don’t know enough to help you secure your house, and I couldn’t give you much background information on this subject. But I can point you in the right direction.

Locked, but not secure (part 1) — An explanation and history of bump keys.
Locked, but not secure (part 2) — Which locks are vulnerable, which locks are not, as well as security and insurance implications.
http://www.toool.nl/bumping.pdf — A lock picking organization’s canonical explanation of bump keying.
http://www.crypto.com/hobbs.html — Is it harmful to disclose this sort of security vulnerability to the public?

I’ve recently learned that the companies that make these products have, after literally decades of knowingly shipping insecure products, begun to respond to the challenge and actually build a safer product. Master Lock, in particular, has released what they call “bump stop” technology, with a specially crafted pin that makes lock bumping difficult if not impossible. Here’s a YouTube video describing the technology.

At the moment, this type of lock is difficult to obtain for residential use; and while technology rarely ever works as well as the manufacturer claims, the important thing here is that bump resistance has become one of the metrics by which the security of a lock is measured, and products are already available to some consumers that address this threat. In short, it we’re at least on the right track.

And now, on with the original article.

It Worked

I recently saw a report on bump keying and how it, in theory at least, makes pin-and-tumbler locks useless. I was a bit skeptical, so I decided to try it out.

Using nothing but the little information I had gained through some Internet searches and You Tube videos, I took an old, unused key, filed it down to the appropriate shape, and tried it in my front door.

It worked first try.

This is serious. Though I’ve been taught how to pick locks, I’ve never successfully opened anything other than a simple desk drawer lock. With this one bump key, I can open about 40% of the locks I encounter in my day-to-day activities. A second key gets will open another 30% of the locks I encounter in a day, and between the two of them, I can open nearly every residential lock I’ve ever seen. This has very serious implications in the world of home security.

Making a bump key is trivially easy, and costs about $4 to do (or free if you already have an old key and a file). It’s not a new technology, and has been used for a few years no by criminals to break into house without leaving obvious signs of forced entry.

Burying Our Heads in the Sand

Continuing to keep this technique hidden from the public is not serving our best interests. The more expensive locks you can buy at the hardware store are expensive because they’re more difficult to open with a lock pick. Those same locks, though, can be opened in under 10 seconds by a bump key; often, the more expensive the lock, the easier it is to open. Everybody knows about lock picking, so lock makers build locks resistant to that technique. Very few people have heard of bump keying, so lock makers don’t bother to make bump-resistant locks. (There’s good reason for them to drag their feet; bump keying is a very, very difficult technique to guard against without radical changes to the way keys and locks work).

Nonetheless, the problem is here, it’s serious, and it’s not going away. Our only hope for any sort security is to force lock makers to start selling bump-resistant locks. They’ll do that only when the general public finds out that they’re being sold snake oil, not security. Our only hope is raising awareness.

To that end, I’ve created a simple video showing the basics of how to create and use your own bump key. All you need is an old key and a file to cut it with. You’ll be opening doors within an hour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwTVBWCijEQ

Refinement

I’m no expert at this. Not at lock picking, not at bump keying, not at anything I’ve talked about here. However, I know who is. Check out www.toool.nl/bumping.pdf for some refinements on this technique.

In particular, their “Minimal Movement” technique caught my attention. I was surprised to find that the directions in the referenced PDF file were all I needed to make that technique work. Unfortunately, in my zeal to create the most efficient bump key, I managed to file away too much and ruin the key.

However, and this is the point, making a new bump key is so easy that there’s really no way to guard against it. You can’t control through legislation any more than you can control lock picks (I’ve seen a lock picked with a screwdriver and a paperclip–you can’t outlaw that!).

So try it out, tell your friends. This is an interesting skill that you can master in just a couple of hours, and a great way to impress strangers at parties. More importantly, when word finally gets out that everybody knows how to bump locks, lock makers will have to respond with better security.

Update

I’ve recently added a follow-up article to this one that answers a number of questions and gives further information about how you can protect yourself. The article is (unremarkably) entitled Bump Key Follow Up.

This one is largely an unfocused repository for whatever I happen to have to say at the moment. And while that was the original intention, it’s not an optimal solution. So, I’ve decided to break my writings up into the following categories:

• Technical articles - How-to’s, explanations, tips, etc. This will probably be the meat of my writings.
• Personal happenings - Sort of a family newsletter idea. Interesting to relatives and close friends; terribly uninteresting to everyone else.
• Snide Remarks - Political commentary, opinions, editorials, that sort of thing.

Perhaps there’s more to add, but that should be enought to get along with. I’m pretty sure I’ve got some interesting stuff to say, but one of my primary problems is that it never seems relevant to the subject of my blog… probably because my blog has no subject. Do my latest .NET coding tricks belong here? How about my musings about some bit of software I’ve been trying out? I don’t know.

I would like to have everything hosted on my site: it sure helps my search engine ratings–my personal website is actually ranked higher than my employer’s; higher than most people’s, for that matter (5 of 10 by Google), meaning that most of what I write about becomes “important” in web searches if it’s not too common a topic.

Since I’m going to be changing things around, I’d be interested to hear about alternatives for my blogging software. I’m using Wordpress right now; It’s nice and all, but I would like a bit more direct control over the content formatting. Less like blogger, more like Slashdot, if that makes sense.

Wiki-based systems are somewhat attractive if you can make the paradigm work. Wordpress is always an option. I expect that this may become my new homepage, so it should be highly customizable with minimal hacking.

More on this is probably to follow once I get more figured out.

I’ll, of course, continue to post content here, but please have a look at this new show and tell me what you think.

Show home page: http://techtrickspodcast.blogspot.com
Show RSS feed: http://techtricks.libsyn.com/rss

Last night, my wife and I decided to go to the store to get some food. It’s been fairly cold recently, so we decided to have a quick look at the weather to see if we should wear a coat or just a light jacket. The thermometer showed that it wasn’t too cold, so we both decided to take just a light fleece. We had a fun evening; it was cool out, but not too cold, just like we had envisioned.

Now that you’ve heard the story, let me fill you in on the details. We live in Colorado up in the “high country,” at around 7000 ft elevation. When I said it had been “fairly cold,” I mean that temperatures had gotten to -15°F the night before; that’s before adding wind chill. Days had stayed in the single digits most of the week.

So when we decided that it was light-fleece weather, it was actually 25°F outside, still well below freezing. Of course, it’s not humid here, so it was a nice, cozy 25°; but still, well below freezing. So how exactly did I begin to think that this sort of weather is not that bad? Well, my criteria for this sort of decision has changed. For example, above about 10° it no longer hurts to breathe. That makes me feel a lot warmer. Above 20°, I can make it from my car to the store without losing too much body heat. I never intend to spend more than 2 minutes out in the weather at a time, so extended exposure really doesn’t even factor into the decision. Having spent all my childhood in Phoenix, I still find my new perception on this subject quite surprising.

Confusion in the Task Manager

You notice that your computer is behaving as though it’s under heavy load, but you can’t find which application is hogging the CPU. You take a look at your task manager and see something like this. Look, in particular, at the areas that I circled:

Here, the process list shows that 7% of the CPU time is being taken by googletalk, while the remaining 93% is spent idle. Those numbers add up just fine. However, at the bottom, we see that 61% of the processor time is in use — that’s a whole lot more than 7%. So what’s using the other 54%?

I know some of you have seen this before and probably thought something devious was going on. Could it be a virus? Perhaps spyware? I’m sure you’ve heard about rootkits–programs that hide their existence from the user. Could this perhaps be a sign of a rootkit?

Well, the reality is a whole lot less exciting. What we’re really dealing with here is bad reporting. Once again, as in the case of the Sony rootkit fiasco, Mark Russinovich gives us the tools to see what’s really going on. One of his free utilities, Process Explorer, gives us a more accurate view than the built-in task manager. Have a look at the following screenshot, and look, in particular, at the first three processes listed. This screenshot was taken soon after the previous one, so the numbers won’t match.

This will all probably make a lot more sense with a bit of explanation…

Interrupts and DPCs

One of the primary responsibilities of the operating system is to schedule time for each process that requests use of the CPU. Most of a program’s run time is spent waiting–waiting for you to type something, waiting for a file to open, that kind of thing. When a program is ready to do something, the operating system schedules it a time slot. Yet even on computers with over a hundred processes running, most of the time there isn’t any process that’s ready to run. The OS schedules this left-over time to process number zero, the “Idle” process. This special-purpose process sends the CPU a HALT instruction that tells the CPU to go into low-power mode and wait for something to happen (like a keypress, for example).

So, we’ve got X number of programs running, plus process number zero, the “Idle” process. Between these, we can account for all the time that’s allocated by the process scheduler. However, this isn’t necessarily all of the time that gets used by the CPU. The OS kernel itself also uses CPU time, but it doesn’t ever have to wait in line for the scheduler. This code, which is usually hardware drivers (like for your video card), runs under a totally different set of rules.

Kernel CPU time is, for the most part, divided into two categories: time spent on interrupts, and time spent on Deferred Procedure Calls (DPCs). These are really two heads of the same beast; the distinction comes from what kind of code you’re dealing with and exactly when that code has to run. The important point is that interrupts and DPCs aren’t part of the normal process schedule, but do take up (some times significant) CPU time.

So, what we saw in the first screenshot was the result of the fact that DPC and interrupt time isn’t reported by Task Manager. At the time of the screenshot, about 58% of the CPU time was being taken by DPCs and interrupts, leaving about 42% of the CPU time for the scheduler to use as necessary. Of that remaining 42% which the scheduler had to work with, 93% went unused and 7% went to googletalk. Some quick math (42% x 93%) tells us that the real time spent idle was only 39%. Googletalk only used 3% of the total CPU time, which was 7% of the time allocated to the scheduler.

Confused yet? Well, here’s the executive summary: Windows’ built-in Task Manager does a poor job at reporting CPU usage because it doesn’t directly report the time that is used by the Windows kernel (drivers in particular). The per-process percentages are actually calculated based on the remaining time after the drivers have already taken their piece of the pie. This can lead to boatloads of confusion when trying to diagnose a problem, particularly when the real culprit is a driver. Process Explorer by Sysinternals does report DPC and interrupt time, thus bringing balance back to the universe.

If you want to find out more about DPCs, interrupts, and Windows process scheduling, check out Chapter 3 of the book Microsoft Windows Internals.

I would imagine that most of you won’t get past that first line; particularly the men, who are wondering how I managed to find such a girl. But stay with me: this is a very serious essay about video games and wasting time, not about how “cool” my wife is.

This birthday request got me thinking. Unless you count flight simulators, I haven’t really played video games much since I left college. Also in college, I developed an almost obsessive dislike of wasting time. The constant, oppressive weight of never-ending class assignments gave me a sort of persistent edginess such that I could only mentally justify avoiding what I had to do if I was still doing something productive. I still can’t sit down and watch TV unless I feel like I’m accomplishing something, like learning something on the History channel.

In looking around trying to decide what’s worth getting, I played a few of the games they have nowadays, and was surprised to find that I didn’t feel like I was wasting time at all. That’s kind of odd, because playing video games has been, for many years now, the quintessential time wasting activity. If anything is a waste of time, it’s video games, right? So why doesn’t it feel that way?

This really surprised and interested me. As hypersensitive as I am about using my time productively, I really expected to be as turned-off about the prospect of sitting in front of a TV controlling a virtual character as I am about watching Friends or CSI. What I came up with is that a well-written game has all of the intellectual elements of a “good use of time” that I have come to expect. These elements can all be boiled down to two basic principles:

First of all, and most importantly, these games are very intellectually stimulating. They make you think in much the same way as, say, fixing a broken radio would. Now, I’m not talking about games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, or any of the rescue-the-princess games we grew up with. Some of these newer games are complex puzzles with subtle clues buried deep inside intricate plots. A lot like a good murder mystery. Not all games are this way, but I’m not really interested in the others.

The other important element is that there is a sense of goals and accomplishment. This is a very common element, because games without it never become very popular. In order to spend much time with a game, you have to feel like you’re actually doing something. But that’s just it: when you turn the thing off, you realize that you’ve accomplished absolutely nothing.

So that must be it. If you haven’t really accomplished anything, you’ve wasted your time, right? Well, perhaps. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series was a great set of books; but after I read them, I had nothing new and useful to show for it. Everything I had learned from those books pertained only to a fantasy world that didn’t exist. No real-world knowledge at all; well, nothing that I hadn’t already heard, at least. Furthermore it took a days to finish those books. I spent more time reading just those books alone than I did in all my video game playing over the past 8 years combined. And yet, how many parents tell their kids that reading the classics will rot your brain? No, of course not.

Video games, I think, have a certain stigma associated with them for a couple of reasons. First of all, early technology made it difficult to make a game mentally challenging but still fun to play. That, combined with a lack of imagination on the part of the programmers lead to a large divide between games like “Final Fantasy” and “Mario: Fun with Numbers.” Of course, kids do what they enjoy, and these simple but challenging games provided kids with the emotional feedback they craved by giving them simple goals which they could accomplish and feel good about. In fact, with video games, the noticeable accomplishment frequency, and therefore the reward-to-time-spent ratio, is much higher than any other readily available activity. These kids, if left to their own devices, will seek out the activity that gives them the most positive feedback—so they’ll play video games all day if they can.

Which brings me to my next point: if a child spends an inordinate amount of time at any activity, even reading, the parent will conclude that the child is wasting time. It doesn’t matter what the activity is; the child could be playing video games, watching TV, playing baseball, solving puzzles, assembling models, or even studying advanced calculus. If he fills the entirety of his free time with the same activity, the parent will be displeased. The kid will be “wasting his time playing baseball,” or “wasting his time with those stupid puzzles.” Video games are just too consistently entertaining.

I see no reason why a good game can’t be as beneficial as a decent book. It’s a fairly new and novel medium that has yet to be fully exploited, I think. Most games, like most books, are, indeed, a waste of time (have you seen what passes as literature these days?). Others sharpen your mind like a good game of chess. Of course, I’m certainly not saying that Call of Duty, as educational as it is, should be used in schools to teach about WWII; but I think that we will eventually have games that will serve that exact purpose. What could better teach you what it was like than reliving the experience yourself? Oddly enough, true-to-life realism and historical accuracy are goals that the game industry is aggressively pursuing. The industry has a long way to go yet, but it also has some powerful potential that shouldn’t be ignored.

Like most of us, I suppose, I run into a lot of web content that seems really interesting, but I often don’t care to read it at the moment. Perhaps I’m looking for something else, or perhaps it explains how to do something that I’m not working on right now. So that’s what bookmarks are for, right? That may be, but it hasn’t worked too well for me. I’ve been disappointed with my bookmark setup for a few crucial reasons.

The first is portability. I use at least 3 computers regularly, and what I bookmark here I want to be available anywhere. Using a bookmark service like Delicious solves that problem; but it also introduces my other problem: ease-of-use. Delicious is, in fact, about as easy to use as they could possibly make the site. But I want something that no website can offer; I don’t want to have to go to their website. I want complete browser integration, like my bookmarks toolbar. I decided that the only solution was to write an extension to integrate Delicious bookmarks directly into Firefox. Then I observed–quite correctly–that I was far too lazy to do that. And then, and this is the cool part, I realized that Delicious and Firefox developers had already done the hard work; I just have to “turn on” the existing capability.

So, there’s the background; here’s the solution. This solution only works with Firefox, not Internet Explorer. It almost works with the new IE version 7, but Microsoft unfortunately left out some very critical pieces in their implementation.

Delicious will serve up your bookmarks either on their website, or in handy RSS form. This works very well with Firefox’s RSS bookmark feture, allowing you to put a “Folder” of Delicious-served bookmarks right into your normal bookmarks collection, anywhere you might otherwise display your own browser-served bookmarks. That includes my old friend, the bookmarks toobar. So, here’s what you do.

Go to your Delicious account (or Delirious — same exact concept, but open-source), select a tag you want to add as a bookmark folder. (Did I explain that these “bookmark folders” are actually the tags you already use? Well, they are.) Now, do you see the little orange RSS icon in the address bar? It looks like this: . Click it.

When you click you get a drop-down list of RSS feeds to use. You want the feed of bookmarks, not the feed of tags. It will then ask you where to put the “live bookmark” and what to call it. You can pick whatever you want, but I’d suggest calling it something short (like the name of the tag) and creating it in the bookmarks toolbar folder. Go ahead and repeat that process of all the other tags you want quick access to. What you end up with is something that looks quite a bit like this:

Of course, there’s no rule that says you can only use your bookmarks. It works just as well with anybody’s bookmark collection. If you want to, you can create a normal bookmark folder (even on the bookmarks toolbar) and put any or all of your “live” bookmarks folders inside it. If you have a lot of computers to do this on, you can get one set up and then copy your “bookmarks.html” file to the others. If you want to do that but you have no idea what I’m talking about, contact me and I’ll walk you through it.

Finally, you’ll need an easy way to add bookmarks to Delicious. You may already know about this, but Firefox supports javascript bookmarks that actually do something. Delicious has taken advantage of this fact and created a bookmark you can add to your toolbar that adds the site you’re looking at to your bookmarks collection. Go to http://del.icio.us/help/ffbuttons to get instructions for installing the bookmark buttons.

One limitation that I haven’t addressed yet is that each live bookmark collection only uses a single Delicious tag. This means that you may want to have a few tags that you use specifically for classifying bookmarks in your browser’s collection. Since Delicious lets you specify any number of tags for a given entry, that’s not a problem. Also, the other RSS feed that we didn’t use, the feed of tags, is one that lists your Delicious tags rather than bookmark entries. This drops you off on the tag’s Delicious page. This may be useful to you if you use a LOT of tags, of you want to link to someone else’s tags collection. Another limitation is the number of bookmarks it will display under one tag. On my browser, it will display the top 31 and clip the rest–the others just don’t fit on the screen. If you have more than that, perhaps you’ll want to consider a more fine-grain classification system. There is no limit (that I’ve seen) on the number of RSS bookmark folders you can create, so go ahead and create as many as you deem necessary.

I hope these ideas help you make better use of your bookmarks collection. If you’re part of that unwashed 90% who still use IE instead of Firefox, perhaps this will give you one more reason to upgrade to Firefox. Give it a try and you probably won’t go back.

Flying Without a License

The first observation I’d like to make pertains to the popular concept of air travel for the masses. There seems to be a lot of hype about the idea of self-controlled aircraft that fly themselves from point A to point B using GPS or whatever, all without the aid of a qualified pilot. The tagline for this technology seems to be: “Getting a pilot’s license is hard. Fly our plane and you won’t need one.”

Well, the concept looks good on paper… at lest to some. But imagine, for a moment, a freeway system where a good number of the cars don’t have capable drivers behind the wheel. In fact, they don’t even have driver seats, steering wheels, or brake pedals. See, technology is great, but technology can fail. When it works, there’s nothing to worry about, but when it breaks, you want to have someone qualified to take over.

Getting a pilot’s license takes a lot of training, but all but a few hours of it is dedicated to teaching you how to get out of situations that might otherwise get you dead. There’s instruction about engine-loss, in-flight fires, severe weather, collision avoidance, and a good many other critical topics.

In fact, the pilots of the more advanced aircraft do the least work but have the most training. You’d be hard pressed to find a jet without an autopilot (and if you found one, you probably couldn’t legally do much with it). They’re not there to fly the plane. The plane flies itself. They’re there to take control when things go wrong. And considering the sort of things some of these pilots have pulled off in an emergency, I’m glad that they’re there. Truth is, flying will always require a license. Not only for the safety of the occupants of the craft, but for the rest of us on the ground, too.

Also, personal aircraft will never gain the same popularity as automobiles. Getting your pilot’s license is quite a bit more difficult than a driver’s license. While driving standards have been adjusted to place a driver’s license well within the reach of even the least capable drivers in America, pilot standards are based on safety, not economics. And despite whatever propaganda you might have read, this isn’t a step you’d be able to skip. (It’s true that you don’t need a license to fly an ultralight…. but you can’t fly it around the city or at any significant altitude.)

Vehicles of the Future

The allure of a “flying car” is unparalleled convenience: door-to-door high-speed travel, never waiting at a security scan again, and best of all, no more traffic jams.

There are a couple of different details to consider when coming up with the flying car of the future. First of all, a vehicle that looks like a car does not fly very well. Sure, you can get it off the ground, but it wont be nearly as safe or efficient as it could otherwise be. Also, it’s important that the vehicle be safe (with or without the engines). And while airframe parachutes are great, their track record is less than perfect; in other words, the craft better be able to glide safely to the ground should things go awful. The vehicle should be reasonably efficient: you shouldn’t need 700hp worth of engine capacity to lift a two-passenger vehicle. Finally, it needs to be relatively simple. Every aircraft owner knows that the more parts you add, the more expensive the thing becomes to maintain–and that goes double for engines. Everything that flies needs to be maintained to a standard unheard of with road vehicles. The cost of doing so is directly proportional to the complexity of the craft.

Existing designs

Here are some of the points regarding existing designs that are commonly considered in this particular pursuit:

Airplanes

Aircraft with fixed wings (normal airplanes) are by far the fastest, but require a whole lot of ground space to take off and land. The whole concept of an airport is built around the need for a large area for planes to safely leave and return to earth.

All else being equal, airplanes are usually simpler craft that respond to mechanical failures fairly gracefully (i.e. safely).

Helicopters

Helicopters are quite the opposite of airplanes. They operate very well at low speed, takeoff and land vertically, and can never fly very fast. Helicopters are astoundingly complicated machines requiring extra vigilant care and maintenance. An engine loss in a helicopter doesn’t necessarily lead to a crash, but it does require a direct return to earth following nearly the shortest possible path, which can be unnerving for all involved.

Autogyros (Gyroplanes)

Autogyros, or gyroplanes (which, by the way, predate the helicopter by more than 10 years, not the other way around), are lifted by a rotor much like a helicopter, but use their forward motion to spin the rotor. This principle, called autorotation, is also what allows helicopters to safely land without an engine. Gyroplanes can’t hover, but can take off and land in a very short distance–often within the length of the average driveway. “Jump” takeoffs (i.e. zero roll) are possible with many modern gyroplanes, but can be fairly tricky to execute.

The average autogyro is substantially more efficient than a helicopter, but not nearly as efficient as an airplane. The utility of this type of aircraft is severely limited; and it has therefore generally only been used by hobbyists and for special missions (like wildlife observation or cattle herding). When operated properly, an autogyro is exceptionally safe; however, it is subject to a number of pilot-induced situations that can be unrecoverable. Proper training is essential for safe operation, but because of the craft’s simplicity, proper training is astoundingly rare. As such, the autogyro has often undeservedly gotten a bad reputation for safety.

Because autogyros don’t require an airport to operate, and because they’re much more simple and efficient than helicopters, this aircraft type is an ideal candidate for our flying car concept, provided the vehicle desired is for short trips where a 100 mph top speed is acceptable.

The world of autogyros stagnated for a good many years after helicopters became popular. Research and development has picked up in recent years, however, once it was realized that (a) helicopters will always be absurdly expensive, and (b) gyroplanes can do what we frequently use helicopters for. The world of personal point-to-point aviation (i.e. flying cars) is of particular interest to the autogyro community, as they see themselves as the best match for the purpose.

VTOL Airplanes

Since conventional airplanes are so fast, many attempts have been made to overcome their glaring weakness (the required takeoff and landing run). So far, all solutions, with one notable exception, have involved simply getting enough horsepower into the craft to drive it straight into the air. This method is effective, but immensely expensive.

The exception was to create an airplane-gyroplane hybrid. Such a craft uses a rotor for low-speed operations, but uses wings at high speed. There have been a number of craft in history to employ this technique. Most notably (and recently), the CarterCopter has been employing this tactic, while at the same time working to safely slow the rotor to reduce drag during high-speed flight. In general, a airplane-rotorcraft hybrid can’t go as fast as a normal airplane. Jay Carter’s company is working to change that.

Goals

There are two basic approaches to finding the “Flying Car” holy grail. The first is an attempt to create an aircraft that you can drive on the road. The other is an attempt to make an aircraft that will take you from doorstep to doorstep, so that you don’t need a car.

Without going too deep into specific designs, I’ll explain the basic methods people are using to try to reach these goals.

Automobile with Airplane Components

When you think of a “flying car,” this is usually the image that comes to mind: an unassuming sort of automobile that allows for the attachment of specialized hardware to allow it to fly. Some of the earliest flying car designs followed this technique, it being one of the most intuitive solutions. The Aerocar (mentioned in Part 1) followed this design, as did the infamous getaway car in the James Bond movie, The Man with the Golden Gun. The Aerocar 2000 project seems to be an attempt at picking up where Molt Taylor left off–we’ll see if that gets anywhere. It’s also quite popular to make some attempt at integrating the wings and other flying matter into the car itself, so as to not have to leave your wings at home. Doing so is a bit of a challenge, so seeing different solutions is really quite intriguing. The automobile-airplane hybrid is so common a technique that no design really sticks out in the crowd. The size of the crowd, however, is a marvel in itself.

Powered Lift

“Powered Lift” is the official FAA terminology for an aircraft that can “power” itself into the air by directing its thrust downward. Aircraft in this category include the tiltrotor V-22 Osprey and it’s smaller cousin the Bell 609, along with V/STOL fighter jets like the Harrier and the Navy configuration of the Joint Strike Fighter.

Moller’s Skycar is the only (as far as I know) flying car design in this category. It’s lonely here for a reason: powered lift aircraft have unimaginably huge engine requirements, and therefore unrealistically expensive fuel consumption rates. Also, of all aircraft designed for slow flight, powered lift aircraft are by far and away the least stable and most dangerous (and difficult) to fly. Furthermore, any loss of power in “hover” configuration for any and all of these aircraft is immediately catastrophic, and very likely unrecoverable. ^[1]

^[1] “Unrecoverable” is an aviation engineering euphemism for, “You get real dead real quick.”

Gyroplane - Motorcycle

Probably the most promising design–that is, the simplest, safest, and cheapest–is to make a roadable gyroplane. Another way to look at it is to create a 3-wheel motorcycle with a rotor and a propeller. Of all the personal flying vehicles in the works, this one seems to be seeing the most progress. Here are a couple projects of note:

• Spark Design’s PALV
  This project is still in the design phase, but if the company’s claims are to be trusted, they’ve already created solutions to a number of thorny problems: a folding propeller and rotor solve the “where do I put these things” problem for when in “road” mode. They’ve also patented some system of allowing the three-wheeled vehicle to tilt into a turn like a two-wheel vehicle would. As far as I know, however, they haven’t produced a prototype, putting them quite solidly into last place in this race. The pictures sure look slick, though.
• Sean Cooper’s street-legal gyroplane
  Sean works in Silicon Valley, and commutes 50 miles to work every day. He managed to get his homebuilt gyroplane registered by both the FAA and, (after some persistence) the DMV. He has to take the rotor off to drive in traffic, and it currently only has one gear for road driving. But it’s a start.
• Larry Neil’s Sky Cycle
  Larry works for Carter Aviation Technologies, the creators of the CarterCopter. Larry’s also got his own company, which been working on a vehicle he calls the “Super Sky Cycle.” In a nutshell, it’s his Monarch gyroplane converted into a roadable vehicle. Thanks to Harley Davidson’s incessant lobbying, it’s trivially easy to register your own homebuilt motorcycle with the DMV; which, incidentally, is exactly what this “chopper” is classified as. This vehicle also has a folding rotor design for road use, and seems to be progressing quite quickly.

Airplane - Rotorcraft

This design attempts to take the best features of the Airplane world and tie them in to a rotorcraft (either Gyroplane or Helicopter). The most notable hybrid in history past was the Fairey Rotodyne: a remarkable 40-passenger craft with full hover capability but no tail rotor–instead it had tiny jet engines at the tips of each rotor blade. It had a top speed of about 190 mph; quite an achievement for its day.

In recent years, Carter and company has picked up the ball and created a hybrid gyroplane-airplane. Their purpose was to make such craft faster by slowing the rotor during cruise. Unfortunately, the CCTD craft crashed a few months back because of some lose bolts or something. While the pilots where fine, the craft was severely damaged. The company has decided, therefore, to focus their attention on the Monarch autogyro (the base design behind Larry Neil’s Sky Cycle) because of funding reasons.

If Carter’s experiment taught us anything, though, it’s that the advantages of both rotorcraft and fixed-wing crafts can be effectively combined without serious side effects. You can take any of the previously-mention rotorcraft and add small wings to get better high-speed performance.

You might expect, assuming that we only use present-day technology, that the flying car of the future will be a roadable aircraft that uses a rotor to take off at low speeds, and a small set of wings for lift at high speed. You might also expect the “AutomoRotorPlane” to have collapsible telescoping wings and a folding propeller and rotor that store out-of-the-way for road use.

A 2 to 4 passenger model would probably do about 80 mph on the freeway, and about 220 mph in the air, all on an engine that burns about 10 gallons of normal automobile fuel per hour. It wouldn’t look like a car, but you’d be the envy of all the neighbors as you back out of your driveway, pull onto the street as the main rotor slowly spins up, then gently lift off and turn toward downtown. You could smile to yourself as you zip 1000 feet above the Monday morning gridlock on your way to the office. A one-and-a-half-hour commute reduced to 8 minutes. Yeah, you can live with that.

The flight time from Colorado Springs is about 30 minutes in my plane. The drive time is about 2 hours–more than that in heavy traffic: the quickest route takes you through downtown Denver. The chances of getting in an accident on the road are higher than we’d like to admit; the chances of getting in an accident in the plane are lower than most of us actually believe.

On the drive home, as traffic on the 10-lane highway ground to a halt (there was a Broncos game about to start), the following thought crept through my mind: I could have been home a half hour ago. And I’ve still got another hour and a half of driving ahead of me. Ugh.

So, why oh why did I take my car? The answer was simple: I needed a car when I got there. Sure, the plane would have gotten me to the airport with enviable speed. However, I wasn’t going there to visit the airport, and the airport wouldn’t have a car for me when I got there. Flying is great, but you have to leave your car at home.

Of course, the obvious solution is a flying car of one sort or another. This isn’t a new concept–the first flying car was built by the Wright Brothers’ contemporary Glenn Curtiss. His aircraft-automobile hybrid flew, but never really got off the ground. Other models that came later were a bit more successful: Molt Taylor’s Aerocar even got FAA type certification; it was, and remains, the only flying automobile to achieve such recognition. Dozens of other “successful” flying car designs have been built, though few have achieved much recognition.

Of course, one of the major problems with these aerial automobile designs is performance and efficiency. My plane, a Mooney M20E, comes with a price tag in the mid $50k range, cruises at around 180mph, and get about 22 MPG. That’s actually a very reasonable vehicle. It cuts a 2-day road trip down to about 4 hours (which, incidentally, is faster than even flying commercial when you factor in the airport time). The Aerocar does just over 100 mph–hardly a cross-country travel machine.

New Designs

The quest continues, and new personal flying vehicles are being designed every day. Just for the fun of it, I’ll go over a few of them for you:

Moller Skycar

This name always seems to come up first. Moller has been relentless in his PR campaign, and managed to continually convince investors that his design is only about 5 years away from public consumption. He’s been saying that for much longer than 5 years now. He’s built a prototype. It’s shiny. It even hovers 50 feet of the ground, though never without being attached to a crane, just in case. As frequently cited an example as it is, it’s highly, highly unlikely that he’ll ever have a certified aircraft, and this design will simply never become mainstream.

CarterCopter

Of all the flying car concepts, the CarterCopter is the most reasonable, viable, and well-developed of the lot. It also bears the least resemblance to a car. For reasons I’ll explain in my next post, this is where I’d put my money.

Jay Carter’s Carter Aviation Technologies is everything that Moller International isn’t. Their prototype aircraft, the CarterCopter Technology Demonstrator has been flying bona fide test flights for 7 years while they tweak and improve the technology. It’s not shiny, it’s not red, and it’s never been photographed in front of a giant American flag. Their design is, essentially, a helicopter with wings. Well, not a real helicopter, they went with a gyroplane because it’s simpler, but the design will work just as well with a hover-capable helicopter.

Anyway, the idea is that a rotor is highly efficient during slow flight, while wings are great for fast flight. So they get their lift from the rotor when going slow, and from the wings at high speed. It’s not a new concept, but these guys are using this prototype to create solutions for long-standing problems this design has faced. And they’re doing a great job. It can take off and land vertically, but cruise at over 170 mph. The overall design allows for speeds well beyond the capability even the most powerful helicopters. It’s also highly efficient and reasonably safe.

Jay Carter has no intention of selling or certifying an aircraft. Rather, he intends to develop, perfect, patent, then license the technology to interested parties. In the end, I’d expect the “flying car” of the future to be a vehicle like this–it flies from building top to building top like a helicopter, but costs a lot less and flies a lot faster.

Sokol A400 et. al.

There’s a large number of individual designer-inventors who have come up with designs for either “flying cars” or “roadable aircraft,” depending on your perspective. Few of these vehicles have been actually built, and some of them wouldn’t even work. Others still sport truly innovative feasible concepts, like collapsible, telescoping wings, on the A400, or the compact, sleek simplicity of the PALV.

The world is not so simple anymore.

Guiding Principles

The truth is, a dictatorship, if run correctly, has the power to beat the pants off a capitalist democracy in every arena. However, in past history, dictators always (overgeneralization, I know) acted in their own immediate self-interest at the expense, and eventual destruction, of the country they run.

Capitalism and democracy solve that problem–a capitalist society acts in its own financial self-interest, while a democratic society acts in its own social self interest, which luckily both actually serve the greater good. However, there’s one serious caveat — a rare condition that can destabilize these systems and make them behave like a poorly run dictatorship. The problem, as you know if you’ve studied economics, is any artificial centralization of power. For example, The Monopoly.

Economic Destabilization

In a capitalist society, each individual entity acts in its own self-interest, attempting to strike some optimum balance where its own return on its investments is at a peak. As luck would have it, when each individual component is working at its peak performance, the economy as a whole is also at a peak. The market automagically adjusts to meet supply and demand changes, and competition drives the innovation required to find new ways of meeting demand while spending less. It’s as though, as Adam Smith put it, an “Invisible Hand” is guiding the market to its optimal performance.

This all assumes, however, that the individual entities always act in their own self-interest, and without interfering with the actions of others. Adding a monopoly to the mix changes all that. If one single player can directly manipulate supply or demand (like a monopoly can), he can force other entities to act in his self-interest, rather than their own. This creates a sub-optimal situation that may not always be obvious.

For example, our most recent American monopoly, Microsoft, has been using is position to control the market to a degree not generally within the bounds of a capitalist environment. For example, nearly all computers sold in this country come with Microsoft’s software pre-installed. You pay for it, of course. Usually, Windows accounts for $60 to $200 of your computer’s purchase price. And at current prices, that could account for a third of the computer’s cost. There are alternatives, of course. Linux, for example, can be had for as low a price as free, and its main hindrance to widespread adoption is its lack of popularity. In fact, nearly every piece of software you’ve ever used has a free alternative that closely rivals (or even exceeds) its commercial counterparts in quality.

Microsoft, however, using its monopolistic influence often takes the choice out of your hands. That copy of Windows running on your computer–how much did you pay for it? You don’t know? Free? No, it wasn’t free. But you didn’t see the price tag, either. Microsoft struck a deal with the maker of your computer (Dell, IBM, Sony, etc.) allowing them to sell your copy of Windows closer to the $60 range instead of the standard $200 price in exchange for an agreement which forces that manufacturer to sell a copy of Windows with every computer they sell–effectively taking that purchasing decision out of your hands. A single company has been allowed to directly manipulate both supply and demand on a few different fronts, resulting in a broken market. Adam Smith sighs resignedly in his grave.

Well, fool me once… and I’m not going to get fooled again: Such acts by monopolies are now illegal in this country. Microsoft went to trial for this very thing, and interestingly enough, the very companies they were influencing, the hardware manufacturers, actually came out in the company’s defense. As history later showed, this hold–the preinstalled software pricing deal–which allowed Microsoft to dictate what the manufacturer would sell, was also used to force these manufacturers to testify in court in Microsoft’s defense–falsely if necessary.

Social Destabilization

These events lead us to the other half of our discussion, the social effects. In a democracy, each citizen is a well-informed active participant in all matters of governance. He votes in his own self-interest, and the society as a whole progresses in what could be considered an ideal situation.

We don’t live in a democracy.

No one does. To use a computing term, democracy doesn’t “scale”. The more members you add, the less effective the system becomes. A system where half a billion citizens spend a good part of their day discussing legal issues and voting on bills would collapse under its own weight. The real truth behind issues presented would rarely be understood, the only decisions that actually get made would have to be pushed through by a “man on a white horse” who mobilizes the masses based on his own propaganda. Democracies of any real size don’t work–it’s just not an option.

We, along with our “democratic” neighbors, live in a Representative Republic. We elect representatives whom vote on our behalf. Your opinion on real-life issues only matters to the extent that it affects whom you vote for. Beyond that, your own views are quite irrelevant to the direction our society takes.

Real governing power is concentrated in the few elected officials who actually direct public policy. If an organization can convince enough elected officials that it’s in their best interest to act in the interest of the organization, then they’ve effectively wrested control of the government out of the people’s hands. If the issues in question are minor (or difficult-to-understand) enough as to not attract too much public attention, any policy decision can be effectively influenced by those with enough political clout. This is, of course, the “Iron Triangle” you heard about when studying government. Bureaucrats, politicians, and special interests run the country. You just think you do.

Companies like Microsoft can then effectively use the legal and legislative system to avoid any social repercussions to their tampering with the economic side of things. You’re the one who gets hurt, but you didn’t get to vote on that decision.

Enter China, Stage Left

This is where the dictatorship comes into play. China still wants to take over the world. Recent history has shown, however, that the most effective way to do so is through economic strategies, not through military conquest.

The societies in Eastern Civilization tend treat authority with a higher degree of importance than their Western counterparts, which leads to a more stable social situation. The success of an Eastern empire is measured in millennia–years are just milestones. It’s not uncommon for an Eastern company to have a 10-year, 50-year, or even 100-year plan on the books.

The current Chinese government is no different. World domination is what they’re after, and they’re willing to wait if that’s what it takes. The government is free to make whatever decisions are required to make that happen without having deal with the requests of special interests.

For example, China is one of the world’s leading consumers of Nuclear Energy research, promising the largest deployment of pebble bed reactors in the world in a time when building nuclear reactors is taboo among countries with an active environmentalist contingent. The fact is, China needs electricity. These reactors are cheap, absolutely safe, low-maintenance, and more environmentally friendly than their conventional counterparts.

The Global Market

One point that makes the current situation different than that of centuries past is an awareness of the global scale of our opportunities. China had found, for example, that it could artificially tie their own currency to the American dollar, thereby assuring that labor and materials in China were always the cheapest no matter what happened to exchange rates–thus guaranteeing the availability of an export market. Export markets are, in fact, the mainstay of Chinese technology production, where supply far outstrips internal demand. And Chinese companies are always looking for ways to better compete on cost; an area where China excels in comparison to other countries where workers’ unions are all too willing to trade a job’s viability for short-term benefits.

The Future of Technology

And that brings us back to our discussion on software pricing. China has the resources and the motivation to produce computers and computer parts at costs below the global average, and its capability is increasing as time goes by. The Chinese government has already publicly eschewed Microsoft and everything they stand for. China has even gone as far as to create its own Linux distribution: Red Flag Linux. This platform has already been adopted by all levels of Chinese operations, from government offices to insurance companies to news media. In China, Microsoft has much less clout.

It’s only a matter of time before Eastern companies start selling large quantities of very-low-cost computer systems to Western consumers. It’s all part of the game plan. The software is free; the hardware is cheap. Here in the West, a small handful of very powerful companies is manipulating the market to their own advantage. The expense we pay is overpriced goods, stifled innovation, and the loss of market dominance.

The situation won’t last forever, of course. The market will recover. The monopolies will be rendered ineffective, and supply will once again balance out with demand. The bad news is that the American economy will no longer have a commanding role in global commerce.

Sooner or later, we’ll all have to learn to speak Chinese.

Click for a larger version.

My self-assigned quest was to figure out exactly what was going wrong, and to do so in a non-destructive way. This involved attaching a serial cable to the modem’s circuit board and using it as a console to interactively diagnose the issue.

Some disassembly required. Some pictures provided.
http://www.tlarson.com/guides/dslhack

Thank heavens for competition. Our phone company was offering a 1-year promotion for $20/month. After the year is over, the price goes up to $25/month. I can live with that. Of course, you’re going to say, what about download speeds?

The cable company, with its massive bandwidth capacity, often advertises download rates that rival those business links that cost thousands of dollars per month. The catch, of course, is that business bandwidth is guaranteed, residental is not.

So in this rare opportunity where I have both DSL and Cable Internet access at the same time, on the same computer, I decided to conduct a scientific experiment. Using Speakeasy’s Speed Test, I did a few speed comparisons with each ISP. There was very little variation in the results; I’m not much one for statistics, but I’d guess a margin of error of about 2% or so.

A couple of points stand out here. First of all, DSL is hitting exactly 82% of its advertised speed both upload and download. That’s significant because general TCP/IP overhead counts for about 20% of your bandwith usage. That means that the DSL connection is actually delivering around 100% of its advertised bandwith.

Cable, on the otherhand, reaches a dismal 28% of its download capacity, and 56% of its upload. This test was conduced at 7pm local time, which is just after cable’s peak usage period. As you may know, total bandwidth is shared between everybody on your cable broadcast network, which is usually everybody in your immediate neighborhood. So while you may be able to get better download speeds in the middle of the night, what really counts is what you get when you’re actually using it.

Another interesting metric is price versus speed. For example, cable costs about 400% of the price of DSL (no promos), and gives you about a 136% of the speed. Conversely, DSL costs roughly 30% of what Cable costs, but gives you about 74% of the speed.

Also, the Cable provider is very protective of its bandwidth, since my usage cuts into other customers’ availablity. As such, certain methods of using your internet connection are prohibited; like for example, running any sort of server whatsoever from your home. As for DSL, it’s all the same to the phone company: whatever bandwidth you don’t use can’t be reallocated to someone else, so you might as well use it for whatever you want.

So, I dug through the javascript source code to find out how they do it. Obviously there’s some real deep magic involved, right? After all, some people pay a lot of money to use things like this on their web page.

So what did I find? Magic? No. It’s all built into the browser. Internet Explorer and and Mozilla-based browsers both have an “editable” mode that handles all the excitement. Microsoft calls their version The MSHTML Editing Platform, while Mozilla has a built-in module called Midas.

What you’re really paying for is that nifty toolbar that allows you to send commands to the browser that say “make this bold” or whatever. It seems almost dishonest for these vendors to brag about all the “features” they’ve included in their version (like “Fonts!”, “Sizes!”, and “Images!”), when it’s actually all provided as part of the browser… which the user already owns. Aw well, welcome to the world of Marketing.

Just for a heck of it, I created an editable version of my own homepage. It’s just the normal page, but with an extra line of JavaScript tacked on the end to turn on editing mode. Note that if you’re using a Mozilla-based browser (like Firefox), it seems to want to stay in editing mode even when you go to another page. You’ll have to close the current tab (or window) to get out of editing mode, since I don’t have a button on the page to turn it off.

A good communicator is one who can get you up in arms about an issue you previously didn’t know existed. This article does exactly that. An absolute pleasure to read.

Here’s an interesting essay describing a particular type of problem we often run into when maintaing other people’s work. There are certain decisions about a project which must be made, but which are not directly related to the technology or design of the underlying archetecture.

While this fact is entirely unremarkable, what is interesting are then various artifacts introduced by the mantenance of these decisions. The gist of the essay (though unstated) is that it’s import to understand the reasoning behind these “bridge color” decisions if the project is going to be properly maintained.

How to make high-gain antennas out of cheap cookware. These examples exhibit much better results than some of the more complicated models that were popular in the past.

Unix programmers like their code like the old legos. Each piece might be a different size or shape, but the bottom of one snaps onto the top of another and the ordering and number of pieces used is left as an excercise for the reader. With experience, anything can be built with the pieces, and yet each piece is simple and easy to understand.

Windows is like the new lego sets. You get specialized premolded parts suitable for one specific task, plus two or three additional add-on pieces that give the illusion of being fully configurable for any task. You can build anything you want with the new legos, as long as you only want to build what is on the cover of the package.

– Tsaingkun

So, how do you know a real find when you see one? Are there any criteria that you can use when screening potentials? Well, there’s no sure-fire way to pick a winner, but after working with many people in the industry, I’ve seen a few trends. What you’re looking for is someone who is mentally brilliant and enjoys working with computers because he enjoys learning new things. Wizards become so because the want to know how everything works, and are willing to do the research to figure it all out.

• Hobbies
  This one is really the key. What you want to know is what they enjoy doing. If a person is in the computer business because he’s smart and enjoys the mental challenge, his hobbies will often involve working with computers as well. If he’s in it just for the money, he probably would rather spend his free time water skiing.
• Programming ability
  If the person does not know how to program a computer, his knowledge of how to work the thing is severely limited. Furthermore, admins who can write programs can solve a problem in far less time than those who cannot. The ability to create your own tools as necessary is a key skill in serious admin work. Finally, programming is one of those skills that every computer genius naturally gravitates towards, while people “in it for the money” naturally shy away from it.
• Knowledge of Programming Languages
  If a person only learned to write computer programs to pass a class in school, his knowledge of programming languages will be limited to those he learned in class. On the other hand, an expert will find learning new languages extremely easy, and will likely be proficient in a good handful of them, while having just a few favorites.

  It is also significant which languages a person knows. While I can’t give an exhaustive list here, here’s some pointers:

  • C/C++: the lingua franca of computer programming. If a person doesn’t know C/C++, he really shouldn’t even be considered a programmer.
  • BASIC, VB: knowledge of BASIC and Visual BASIC counts for very little, but is better than nothing.
  • Java: while not terribly useful in most cases, java is a respectable programming language.
  • PHP: this language is used almost exclusively for web programming. Many people understand the basics of PHP programming, but few understand the deep details. PHP experts are often experts in other languages as well.
  • Perl: this language is extremely powerful and quite difficult to master. A serious Perl programmer is a force to be reckoned with. He can often solve problems many times more quickly than his peers.
• Linux/BSD Experience
  It’s been my experience that the smartest in the computer world naturally develop an interest in Linux (and/or BSD –a similar alternative). Linux provides an ideal environment for the curious computer user, as it allows the user to gain a much more in-depth understanding of the internal workings of the system. A deep understanding of Linux and other similar operating systems counts very strongly in a person’s favor, especially if he actually uses it on his own personal computer.
• Certifications
  This is a tricky one. Companies started offering tech-related certification exams for two reasons: First, and most importantly, the wanted to make a lot of money off the growing IT industry; and second, they wanted to establish a baseline level of knowledge for IT professionals. When push comes to shove, though, companies doing the certification (like Microsoft) would much rather make money than be useful. As such, certifications have sometimes degraded into something of a purchased diploma as the companies responsible have attempted to appeal to a much wider (and less capable) customer base.

  A certified professional is at least guaranteed to have memorized a bunch of facts about the technology he certified in. He’s not guaranteed, however, to be able to solve problems as difficult as, say, tying his shoes. It’s unfortunately very difficult to test problem-solving skills, while it’s very easy to test memorization. And, while certification exams test knowledge, it’s the ability to solve problems that makes a difference in the real world. A person with an IQ in the 130-140 range is worth an army of “certified professionals.” Some of the more intelligent and experienced techies actually refuse to take certification exams because they see it as insulting.