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If the command line is the same as what we have today, absolutely. But there is something about a command line interface, I think, that is fundamental to the human brain. After all, what is our primary means of interacting with other humans? A linear sequence of symbols -- also known as speech. Phonemes serve as the symbols, in this case. Our brains are *highly* optimized for this -- we can memorize an amazingly large number of arbitrary symbol strings, deal with all sorts of wierd rules of how to put those strings together, etc.

So there's a real reason that the command line hangs on, I think. The main problem with it is that it's largely context-free. But the more modern shells have made progress in this area -- look at tcsh. You can hit the tab key to complete a file or command name, or show a list of the completions available. And in vim, you can hit ctrl-P or ctrl-N to complete a word you're typing, by searching up or down the document for another word that starts with the same letters that you've just typed. It's amazing how useful this is when you get used to having this ability. And why are these things useful? They make use of context.

Think about the voice-interface computers on Star Trek. They are extremely sensitive to context. That's how it knows what the user means when he/she gives a command. But other than that, it's really just a command line interface, only spoken instead of typed.

And typing isn't going to go away either. For one thing, it'd be as annoying as hell if everyone was using a voice interface at my company -- the chatter would be incessant! You know, on Star Trek, there was never more than one person in the room talking to the computer at a time. On the bridge, what were all those officers around the edges of the room doing? They were typing, essentially -- if they were all using voice interface, they'd interfere with each other, and even with the captain's ability to think and make decisions.

As for using a keyboard vs.a GUI, one thing people seem to forget is the fact that a keyboard is a highly parallel interface, whereas the mouse is quite serial -- you only have one mouse pointer on the screen at a time. A lot of the time, you have to position that pointer very carefully (especially on windows), and take care to not move it when you click the button, etc. May not seem like a big deal, but try it with a messed up hand or carpal tunnel. With that, you can really feel how very serialized that interface is. It's so very slow.

With a keyboard, you can reach out and press any button you wish, even multiple buttons at once, in some cases. True, many programs using keyboard interface force you into serialised mode, but then again, you have ctrl keys and F keys and the like -- which can cause the program to jump into doing something completely different. I'd say that games make good use of parallelism on the keyboard too.

So what is my ideal interface? I'm not really sure. A touch screen with a virtual layout of buttons that could change with context (and some kind of tactile feedback for button pushes, and ability to press more than one thing at at time)? Might work, but then again, there's something inherently useful about having a static, physical set of buttons -- our motor neurons work best when they're highly trained for specific tasks. If you had a virtual keyboard that kept changing, it'd be more difficult to be quite as fast with it. You'd basically have to be hunting-and-pecking all the time. You'd be in a tight loop -- looking at the screen for the button to press, then pressing it, then watching to confirm the effects so you can tell where the next button will be to press. That's a very linearizing process, isn't it? Might as well be using a command line.

Ok, I'm done ranting. By the way, here's a reference to that "In the Beginning was the Command Line" article by Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon). It contains an interesting perspective on the history of the command-line interface (among other things).

I disagree, spying on and *stealing* German scientists and tech (through clandestine means) is what gave the Allies a good push in technological advancement. The spy game was a lot more important in WW2 than people seem to give credit for. Its not really 'the bomb' that pushed advancement and developement of technology, it was breaking German cryptography that brought a real need for the advanced development of a mechanical/electrical computer.

In almost lame slashdot irony, read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and you can get a feel for the spy game of WW2. Its very fictional, but it has a lot of real information about the going ons of places like Bletchely park during the war, and just how much the spy game affected tech advancement.

The bomb is really what epitamizes (is that even a word I can use here?, im just trying to sound smart) most 'tech' discussions about 1938-1945, especially in our context of war. Both the US and the Germans had the ideas of how to build the bomb. But nobody knew what the hell would happen when they tried to set it off. Kinda like some folks just KNOW God exists, but won't really know until they die. Doom of death from war, which is a long and annoying quote in the first place, sorry, would sure as hell make ME think and work harder and faster than usual, and thats what I'm getting at. People will work much differently with a threath like that in their face. The insane amount of resources thrown at the situation allowed for plenty of mistakes through trial and error. When resources are limited, a lot more time is put into verification and perfection, b/c without war you are allowed to take your time and be more patient, wouldn't you agree?

His fountain pen must have run out of ink.

Read Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (excerpt) for an interesting (but fictional) account of what needs to happen to make it real.

This is reminiscent of an idea used in the "first computer" developed in the book Cryptonomicon. The RAM is a series of tubes holding mercury, which store values based upon waves introduced into the tubes which closed electical circuits (if I remember rightly). It'd be cool to see one actually working ;-)

In Neal Stephenson's "Diamond Age" an intelligent, interactive book powered by mongo nanotech falls into the hands of a young, semi-literate, white-trash girl who, through it's influence at a formative and inately inquisitive phase of her development, blossoms into an intelligent, informed, inquiring woman of near limitless perspicacity. Then there was some other stuff about humanity and blah blah blah and basically a whole bunch of crap which doesn't entirely support my argument, which is that if one or two of these things is made available in every poor, remote village in a third world country, and if curious youngters who don't have access to formal education gain access to them, and if the youngsters are able to connect them to the net using the single crappy phone line that runs into their village then suddenly they have a whole world of information at their fingertips. Over time this could have an enourmous affect on the rural populations of poor countries.

A simple example - nothing good is cheap in second hand shops in little country towns anymore because, despite physical isolation, the shop keeper can look up any curious thing that comes their way on e-bay and find there's come schlep out there who's willing to pay a packet for [insert name of weird collectable something here]

Apply the same logic to global crop prices and suddenly these people will have clear evidence of how badly they are being shafted by global capitalism. Whether or not they can do anything about it is a separate question, but knowledge and information may help to get the ball rolling.

Like this one?
http://cryptonomicon.com/

Enjoy. :)

Say again?

over the decade of Microsoft's hegemony, computing power has grown cheaper and cheaper.

It boils down to ``OS doesn't matter - you need windows'' - in other words, a blatant bit of technically inaccurate flamebait. (And very good flamebait too - I've bitten...) Unfortunately, there's still idiots out there who believe what he's saying, and will think ``if even the experts say the OS is irrelevant and we should all buy Windows, then I will''.

We need Microsoft itself to be the universal stepladder that lets us climb out of our hole and smell the roses. ... euch. Troll just isn't a good enough word for it. Pass the 2x4x24.

"My prediction is that within three years time, Microsoft will `give away' its operating system to preserve its revenue in the applications business."

Stephenson hints around this concept in 'In the Beginning was the Command Line'. I don't remember the exact wording, but the concept was that the operating system is basically a commodity when compared to application software. The only thing that makes an OS necessary is that you'll use it to accomplish tasks necessary to run an application.

We've seen this kind of commoditization in browser software. I know I'm not the only who remembers walking into an EB and seeing a boxed copy of Netscape on the wall. What Netscape realized and MS copied was that the browser was merely a commodity necessary for individuals to access the internet. There were already freeware browsers. Netscape essentially gave away its browser so that it's compliment, Netscape Web Server-- later iPlanet server-- would sell better.

OS's are going the same way. Where does MS make its money? Windows revenue accounts for precisely *dick* when measured up against a million OEM MSOffice licenses, per-seat DB licenses, multiprocessor Exchange licenses, etc. (My company recently dropped $15k for MSSQL on a 2 processor box.) If Windows was more important in terms of revenue than Office, why is Microsoft still making Office for Mac? Why not force those users to switch to Windows to use Office?

Microsoft wants to charge for Windows and bust people for using pirated copies simply because they still can get away with it at this point. When they can't-- such as currently is the case in the PRChina-- they'll start turning a blind eye to OS piracy and may even tacitly circulate a few copies themselves to increase 'market penetration'. Eventually, they'll start offering ridiculously low-priced 'Student Discount' copies of Windows, like they have in the past, with both OS's and development tools. Eventually, as OpenOffice, AbiWord, and other Office competitors mature, You'll start being able to get more and more Windows feature for free while MS continues to extract flesh for licenses for Office, MSSQL, Exchange, and other servers and apps.

In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson. If you haven't already read it, it's basicaly a history of operating systems and why they are how they are, intertwined with metaphors on how what parts work and a breakdown of OS/GUI variations and such. His stuff is way better than my explanation. It's free...so download it instead of listen to me ramble. If you hate it, the most you've lost is the time you took to DL and read what told you that. Also available in print.

you can read more about it here

By the way, if you remember Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, this is the kind of machine Randy used to surreptitiously record his meeting with somebody-or-other, probably the Dentist, when they were busy convincing everybody of their plans for Increasing Shareholder Value. Predecessors of this machine design were available back then.

but I'm no physicist. Here goes:

The article says that it would be difficult to intercept because interception would be easy to detect because the interception would change the state of the photons. Okay. But then it says that since photons are so easy to deflect the reciever would have to send back info about what packets are missing. So couldn't you just intercept a bunch of bits and the reciever would just assume interference. Is this one of those signal-to-noise inference things a la Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon"?

Furthermore, it mentions some absurd length of time to decrypt these messages, but I assume that's with current tech. What about with a quantum computer? Isn't that the sort of thing that they are supposed to excel at?

Just wondering....

Okay, so make a movie from Cryptonomicon. You've got your scientist characters (Turing & co.), plus the WWII action, plus the best depiction of modern hackers (in the non-derogatory sense) as I've seen in print.
Of course the movie would have to be about three weeks long to do it justice...

I believe Neal Stephenson made a pretty good argument for "open hardware" being a significant contributor to the existence of linux. He mentions the unlikely trinity of Bill Gates, IBM clones, and Linus as being the combination of things needed for linux to be created. Read it here

ITBWTCL :) Same deal but with cars.

Just checking. I can't believe no one's mentioned the part in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon where Randy "prints" out the "message" (trying to avoid a spoiler) on his laptop's LED.

Here's an LED controller program inspired by that bit in the book.

Bonus points: Spurious Stephenson Reference!

Spurious Stephenson alert! Kudos!

Here's your friendly /. neighbourhood rhetoric wonk weighing in... I have to wonder what the semantics, grammar, and rhetoric of the Longhorn interface are going to be. In case you're wondering, the underlying ideational structures of the interface create its meaning, and make the difference between dumb and intelligent design, useful and frustrating, easy-to-learn and Adobe ;) and so on. So far I haven't been too impressed with much of anything MS, rhetoric-wise. Some pretty impressive people (not just weirdos like me) have also weighed in on the importance of this issue, like:

Terry Winograd
Joseph Goguen
Eben Moglen
Neil Randall

and a bunch of lesser lights including Neil Stephenson.

While I'm not against innovation, I have a hard time imagining that MS could actually come up with something more intelligent than these folks, all of whom, I notice, aren't working for MS. Even Neil Randall, who apparently took some money from MS to do a study works for the University of Waterloo (hi, Neil!).

Maybe I'm just a Jaded Cynic, but I have to wonder.

The really paranoid would use the Cryptonomicon approach; keep the passwords strongly encrypted, don't make it obvious that you're entering the password, and use something like the blinking of a status LED to report the password (to help prevent shoulder-surfing).

Even these wouldn't be entirely risk-free (see the story about modem status lights giving away secrets), but it'd be safer than having the same password for everything. Until the DNA computers can factor huge primes, that is...

To use Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar point of view as well as Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning... , as well), Windows has less and less sale value, while operating systems (including Linux and Windows) have tremendous, and ever-growing use value.

Microsoft depends on the sale value of its operating system to generate the revenue necessary to fund its continued research and development. Linux depends on its use value for futher adoption and enhancement from the community that uses and supports it.

If all goes according to ESR's and SN's predictions, operating systems will be free, unless some provide compelling value, above and beyond the capability of other free operating systems. My point is, there will probably be no room for commercial operating systems in the near future.

I think you're right. There will be room for both free and commercial software. Microsoft will just need to focus on software that can still be productized and sold for profit. Windows will likely soon not meet that burden as Linux continues to make progress.

A long, incisive, and--in its own way--funny essay by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. Nominally about the OS wars, it has an interesting analysis of the way our culture has traded in text (books) for media (videos, movies, TV, music, theme parks, etc). It is a different take on many of the issues raised by Fahrenheit 451.

You can get a taste of it from this cookie file.

Seeing this, I felt I had to post a link to the wonderful "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson.

He makes the point that computing (and life) is a "very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own".

I guess I'm one of them. I know the Morlocks and the Eloi from Jules Verne's book (The Time Machine). I'm not sure if the original had the "tech creators vs. tech user's" bias, but it seems many found that interpretation later. Neal Stephenson was one of them - I discovered his interpretation in the excellent essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line". The essay is primarily about operating systems, and can be found online on his Cryptonomicon site.

Next month, we will explore the workings of a Turing Machine and follow Alan into the war effort. We will see how a single man's true genius can turn the tide of war, and we will shake our heads in disbelief at a hero's humiliation and eventual death. Stay tuned.

It's kind of sad that Slashdot linked to the first part of this series rather than waiting for it to finish. The true depth of Turing's story lies in what happened during the war. If you've never read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, now is an excellent time to start; Stephenson's fictional Turing is an excellent read.

Many who have studied Turing's life believe that this book by Hodges is the definitive work of a man who was arguably a casualty of his lifestyle. Turing's answers to the three Great Questions of Mathematics - Completeness - Is Mathematics complete? Could every question be proven or disproven? Consistency - Does Mathematics always give the same answer? - and Decidability - did a chain of logic exist to prove or disprove any assertion - well, all of these were overshadowed by the fact that as a homosexual he defied God's Will - but all in all his contributions to Mathematics are staggering.

The lasting pervasiveness of this man's work - (who doesn't know what a "Turing Test" is?) - is a living testament to his genius. It's funny that on the same day we discuss the Nobel Prize we discuss the man most obviously deprived of it.

...is why a company called Advanced Digital Communications, is in the business of exploration and sonar equipment development (apparently, based on what googling I did)?

They have a ship (ships?) capable of deploying both side-scan sonar and UROVs - but they call themselves something that has nothing to do with _what_ they do...

To top it off, they are a Canadian (Toronto) based company, but are currently stationed in Havana, Cuba - and are "exploring" areas apparently "known" to be rich in sunken Spanish galleons, many of which went down with treasure (apparently to "test" their sonar devices). Furthermore, they are in some form of a "joint venture" with the Cuban government, namely Castro...

So, do you think when/if they bring up the gold (and/or get funding for this "lost city" venture), the next step will be the laying of redundant fiber links to Central America and Mexico, and the establishment of a real data vault/haven, ala Cryptonomicon?

I don't think it is gold they are after...

Cryptonomicon comes to mind indeed when reading your laptop description and your hardware keylogger concerns. BTW that book gives many good insights on data security often overlooked by people applying with "brute-force" encryption techs w/o considering well what happens with the data between you and the encrypted channel entrance...

While I disagree with a lot of what Stephenson wrote in his essay
"In The Beginning Was The Command Line" (find it here,) a lot of it is obviously accurate.
Without the PC's open architechture the demand for programs would have been harder to supply, and without Microsoft's influence and saturation of the market, there wouldn't have been a demand for cheap PCs.

Open architechture of PCs == clones
IBM clones == Cheap PCs.
Cheap PCs == computers to play with for the non-super-rich hoi-polloi.

With PC hardware as open (and cheap!) as it was (and is) Linus and RMS were able to do stuff. I really dislike Stephenson's closing of the essay, talking about the right pinky of god and all that shit, but even today, it's a well written essay with many good points.

While I do have a CS degree, I don't always have enough understanding on how to fix the problem that I have found. However, my discovery of the bug (especially if it is unique) coupled with a detailed and repeatable description and test case can be a boon to developers who will hopefully have enough familiarity with the code to find the problem and correct it.

You said:

[BillG said:] "Really, the reason you see open source there at all is because we came in and said there should be a platform that's identical with millions and millions of machines,"

So wat he's saying is that the mass adoption of their inflexible software has driven people to create open products that will meet their needs, or am I misinterpreting him ? ;)

Yes, you are misinterpreting him. What he is referring to is the wide availability of standards-based hardware due to the Microsoft-Intel alliance that, like it or not, brought computing out of the hobbyist and into the business world. They accomplished this despite their crappy software (compare: Macintosh), and probably because IBM fudged the attempted hardware-monopoly thing.

The emergence of Linux as a (cool)UNIX-like OS that runs on consumer hardware then lead to the explosion of interest in all things Open Source. Of course, the FSF and the GPL was around way before Open Source, so Gates knows his terminology here.

So, despite the contempt people have for Microsoft, you have them (and Intel, and IBM(for fucking up)) to thank for the cheap (relatively speaking) x86 hardware that Linux runs so happily on.

Take a look at In the beginning was the command line, by Neal Stephenson, for another take on the matter.

If anyone wants an intelligent dense discussion of globalism and get the OS revolution's as a bonus, read the 1999 essay In The Beginning Was The Command Line. rather than bothering with Katz or his smarty-boy-of-the-moment.

Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors as Communist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not possible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in Communist countries, because the whole point of Communism was to eradicate poverty. Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit.

It's just the next step in making the usage of a computer more "user friendly" and thereby utterly inefficient. Typing vi kane/rosebud.text is so much faster than double-clicking on the folder kane and then on the file rosebud.text, and by far faster than saying "Show Speakable commands. Open folder Kane. Open folder Kane. Open folder Kane. Finally! Open file Rosebud dot text. Open file Rosebud dot text. Open file Rosebud period text..." Now, if you don't even use real language but only grunts, it becomes even worse. Talking about "Disneyfication"! Or rather, alienation of the work process.

Given that from what it seems the US + coalition did not have any eyes and ears on the ground in the -stans on the 11th, I guess a lot of the (at least, initial) intelligence must have come from satellites...

Does anyone know what resolution you could get from a spy satellite? Does anyone know what sets the resolution limit - the optics or image processing? I bet a combination of RF/IR/visible photos of the region could give you shitloads of info about what's Out There.

I read somewhere that bin Laden does not use any electrical devices in fear of detection. Personally, I am not sure about that - he'd need to coordinate activities and keep some intelligence channels to keep up to date. Unless he's doing things the Pony Express way, he must maintain some sort of telecoms. That's perhaps where an EP-3E would be handy...

Let's hope the US can infiltrate bin Laden's network, compromise his crypto and communications, and screw with his and his friends' heads until they mess up their operations big time, Cryptonomicon way. That would be the best way to catch bin Laden and put an end the entire Catch-22 situation of having to drop both Cruise missiles and aid on the poor Afghans' heads. And, hey, the boys and girls at Langley have probably been working hard on it the last few weeks, but that's the war we don't and won't hear about.

That GUIs do not allow the flexibility of using a language that command lines do. The buttons just don't offer that kind of rich control.

The ongoing build-up of highway mileage in the US is under the direction of our various governments, from local to national. Commercial gain in construction doesn't come into the picture until it is time to bid out the building contracts. The only real area for speculation has been in the economic potential of land in proximity to the proposed public thoroughfare.

By contrast, the century-ago boom in railroad construction really was that if-you-build-it-they-will-come type of speculation by private moneyed interests. Eventually, consolidation followed the boom, as smaller and over-extended lines failed, or were snapped up by the larger, better managed, or just plain more politically powerful lines. Redundant lines were closed. Unprofitable areas were abandoned.

I can think of only one freeway that has been torn down because the municipality thought it was a mistake that didn't serve the public's needs. With few exceptions, are no "dark" highways. Despite what your local politicians may say, roads aren't widened to relieve congestion. They are built to increase capacity. Congestion just means that they haven't been widening them fast enough.

You want to see dark fiber light up, socialize the network and make access to it free to the individual, just like the US highway system. Latency may increase, but only because the volume has exploded. And underexploited resources will NEVER be a problem again.

But as things are going now, we'll soon be needing a something like Rails to Trails for glass wire.

It was a reference to Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, if I'm not mistaken. In the book, "Pinoygrams" were the short video-greeting-cards that Filipinos overseas could send home to family, to be viewable for a small fee at convenience stores with terminals. It was set up to finance the construction of a data haven IIRC.

Cryptic messages began to scroll up the screen. If you had booted a commercial OS, you would, at this point, be seeing a "Welcome to MacOS" cartoon, or a screen filled with clouds in a blue sky, and a Windows logo. But under Linux you get a long telegram printed in stark white letters on a black screen. There is no "welcome!" message. Most of the telegram has the semi-inscrutable menace of graffiti tags.

not necessarily ...

Take Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, it has several great examples of instances when you need to transfer data and normal methods either aren't available, or can't be used (ie. sending messages via a deck of cards).

Using lamps might seem a little McGuyverish, but it certainly has it's uses.

_f

What you morons are missing is that OS's are fucking dead!

In the world of open source software, bug reports are useful information. Making them public is a service to other users, and improves the OS. Making them public systematically is so important that highly intelligent people voluntarily put time and money into running bug databases. In the commercial OS world, however, reporting a bug is a privilege that you have to pay lots of money for. But if you pay for it, it follows that the bug report must be kept confidential--otherwise anyone could get the benefit of your ninety-five bucks! And yet nothing prevents NT users from setting up their own public bug database.

This is, in other words, another feature of the OS market that simply makes no sense unless you view it in the context of culture. What Microsoft is selling through Pay Per Incident isn't technical support so much as the continued illusion that its customers are engaging in some kind of rational business transaction. It is a sort of routine maintenance fee for the upkeep of the fantasy. If people really wanted a solid OS they would use Linux, and if they really wanted tech support they would find a way to get it; Microsoft's customers want something else.

Hrm... sounds familiar...

You're dead wrong. Mobile phones put you in charge. They generally have CLI so you can see who's calling and you get the option to reject the call

Holy! Which telco gave you the phone with a CLI?! I've been dreaming of doing some batch scripting and 'make's from my Motorola, but all I've got to work with is their freaking GUI. Will it do filename completion? Command history? More details, please!!!

In the Beginning was the Command Line

If you haven't read Cryptonomicon yet, I heartily recommend you do so. It's three quarters of a good novel, and the last quarter has enough twists in it that you can overlook the cheese and the fanboy religious overtones.

You can read the prologue online and decide for yourself. Try before you buy, and see some of the zeta functions Stephenson is talking about.

This from Neal Stephenson explains why almost all of our current UIs are crap myself I find myself in console more and more often also I find that when I'm helping someone I take them into the CLI. It is in many ways just easier now I know this is not for everyone but the limitations of a GUI make it impossible to create something that is *really* good.

Just thought that a link to this would be appropriate right now while we speak of all those fancy GUI:s.

Actually, it's much, much more likely that the x-ray machine is not the culprit at all. Remember that hard drives are magnetic in nature. X-rays are no more magnetically charged than the light from the light bulbs in your house. X-rays will erase highly sensitive photographic film, but that's about the sum total of damage that they could ever do to any of your stuff.

However, in close proximity to the X-ray machine is a device that makes use of strong magnetic fields: the metal detector. Carrying a laptop though one would almost certainly mess with the data on it (note that it wouldn't totally wipe the drive beyond recovery. If you think it'd do that, put down the Neal Stepenson book and take a break).

Now, metal detectors are supposed to be shielded from interfering with devices not going through them, but, needless to say, that's not always the case. It's more than possible a more sensitive than usual hard drive could be corrupted by just passing next to one.

Appearing with him was Bruce Schneier (of Counterpane fame) who also discussed the Cryptonomicon appendix about encryption; he seemed like a really nice, uber-hacker kinda guy. If you're interested in security, etc. I say get Bruce!