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You, sir, need to read Necronomicon: In The Beginning Was The Command Line. Several times I reckon.

The GUI is an obstruction, unnecessary fluff that just gets in the way. When you are talking about servers, its about using the hardware to do one thing, fast and simultaneously: Serve The Users.
Not load Internet Explorer at boot
Not bring the server to its knees running OpenGL 3D screensavers, and certainly not to run DirectX games.

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.ht ml

Here is an excerpt from the book:
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Copyright 1999 by Neal Stephenson

During the late 1980's and early 1990's I spent a lot of time programming Macintoshes, and eventually decided for fork over several hundred dollars for an Apple product called the Macintosh Programmer's Workshop, or MPW. MPW had competitors, but it was unquestionably the premier software development system for the Mac. It was what Apple's own engineers used to write Macintosh code. Given that MacOS was far more technologically advanced, at the time, than its competition, and that Linux did not even exist yet, and given that this was the actual program used by Apple's world-class team of creative engineers, I had high expectations. It arrived on a stack of floppy disks about a foot high, and so there was plenty of time for my excitement to build during the endless installation process. The first time I launched MPW, I was probably expecting some kind of touch-feely multimedia showcase. Instead it was austere, almost to the point of being intimidating. It was a scrolling window into which you could type simple, unformatted text. The system would then interpret these lines of text as commands, and try to execute them.

It was, in other words, a glass teletype running a command line interface. It came with all sorts of cryptic but powerful commands, which could be invoked by typing their names, and which I learned to use only gradually. It was not until a few years later, when I began messing around with Unix, that I understood that the command line interface embodied in MPW was a re-creation of Unix.

In other words, the first thing that Apple's hackers had done when they'd got the MacOS up and running--probably even before they'd gotten it up and running--was to re-create the Unix interface, so that they would be able to get some useful work done. At the time, I simply couldn't get my mind around this, but: as far as Apple's hackers were concerned, the Mac's vaunted Graphical User Interface was an impediment, something to be circumvented before the little toaster even came out onto the market.
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Kind of ends where MacOS X is picking up.

>'Complex, configurable' interfaces place an unreasonable burden on the user. It's the developer who should have to worry about making
>the UI efficient--not the user. This is the standard we hold non-computer products to. We don't expect auto makers to let us replace the
>steering wheel with a joystick--using one would be another skill we'd have to master, when we could simply be driving. Another example--
>kitchen appliances. The 16 speed blenders of 25 years ago have predominantly given way to models which turn on and off. Why? Because
>the added complexity--in the name of configurability--was unneccesary, useless, and in the end, unwelcome.

Hmmm. I think you need to read Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line right through. To begin with, your steering-wheel / joystick analogy is broken. For most kids in the modern day, the joystick is an interface they are familiar with long before they are of age to drive a car; by your reasoning the joystick - or using Stephenson's analysis, a GUI - would be a better choice in cars designed for people used to these interfaces. That is categorically wrong, as Stephenson shows...
A favourite paragraph:

By using GUIs all the time we have insensibly bought into a premise that few people would have accepted if it were presented to them bluntly: namely, that hard things can be made easy, and complicated things simple, by putting the right interface on them. In order to understand how bizarre this is, imagine that book reviews were written according to the same values system that we apply to user interfaces: "The writing in this book is marvelously simple-minded and glib; the author glosses over complicated subjects and employs facile generalizations in almost every sentence. Readers rarely have to think, and are spared all of the difficulty and tedium typically involved in reading old-fashioned books."

I could say a lot more on the whole GUI topic, but it's been said before and better by authors like Stephenson. Read the essay, and see if you agree with me or not. Savant

I read about this in Cryptonomicon already.

I think the things Neale Stephenson says about Disney and Culture in In the Beginning Was the Command Line are absolutely dead on.
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The pain text version of this posted there is plainful. Go read the full HTML/CSS version here.
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This is truly a scifi story for geeks... What other tale in the world has had it's own Encryption Algorithym created just to lend plausability to the story?

Stephenson has been criticized by some for getting to deep into the trivial details in his fiction, but personally that's why I read it.

-Tommy

P.S. It's good to see this story is back.

This is truly a scifi story for geeks... What other tale in the world has had it's own Encryption Algorithym created just to lend plausability to the story?

Stephenson has been criticized by some for getting to deep into the trivial details in his fiction, but personally that's why I read it.

-Tommy

P.S. It's good to see this story is back.

I know this has been posted to previous N.S. threads, but check out this Stephenson article titled "In the Beginning was the Command Line". It gives a little more background on his thought process for a few of the things in this interview.

apps and os's, huh? Slightly o/t, but it seems I remember something about Microsoft, and those two categories in particular, in this article.

The best quote from the essay is a fictional conversation between a potential user and a member of the Linux faithful...

"The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers' attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."

Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"

Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!"

Bullhorn: "But..."

Buyer: "Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"

Priceless... =)

• Islands in the Net

• Neuromancer

So why keep asking if HavenCo is based on

• Cryptonomicon

I think the most obvious predecessor to the Data Haven is the "Swiss", or Overseas Bank Account, affording the rich and discreet the opportunity to hide their wealth in a safe place away from prying eyes and overzealous governments. Use the equation that information is money and the Data Haven is a new feather on an old hat idea that frankly has taken far to long to be implemented imho, and not a creation of Islands in the Net or Cryptonomicon.
In that vain I would like to congratulate HavenCo for getting us up to speed, and ask the CTO:
During the 1980's insider trading crackdown, the US government, specifically the FBI, was able to use intimidation and clout to break open the records of one of those supposedly impenatrable overseas accounts to gain eveidence in the case against the infamous Michael Milkin. Do you forsee history repeating itself and HavenCo or the Sealand government being intimidated or coerced into opening up your data to other nations with vast and far reaching power?
And the question we all *really* wanted to ask: will the dramatic theft scene in the next Mission Impossible sequel be Ethan Hunt stealing valuable data from under the noses of highly trained HavenCo guards?
-chorder

It wouldn't be for ALL writing...its more things like "this chapter is free, $1 and you can read the whole book", etc.
Very true. E.g. the web site forCryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson's year-old (and awesome) book includes the first ~75 pages of the book, plus an essay entitled In the Beginning Was the Command Line. Recently, I emailed a friend the URL for the book excerpt. He promptly purchased the book. Furthermore, in regards to In the Beginning... the entire essay is available for free on the site, or for $10 at any bookstore. I read it online and went out and purchased an actual copy of said essay. Just because people have access to the contents of a book or music or whatever doesn't mean they won't actually support the artist/author/whatever. If these musicians can't convince people that liner notes and a pressed CD are worth $15 then they should (as someone else pointed out) tack on some added value.

Who is neil stephenson and why should I be excited? I'm going to assume this a joke, but on the off chance it's not..."have you heard the good word, my brother?" Neil Stephenson is one of the two (IMHO) best cyberpunk authors existant. (The other being, obviously, Wm. Gibson) Cyberpunk is a fairly new (emergant in the early 80s) genre of hard science fiction. It deals (mainly) with the socio-cultural impact of emergent technologies, particularly machine-learning and the internet. (try here for a bio by his publisher or here for a bio apparently aelf-authored.) Stephenson's main works are: _Snow Crash_ (his first big hit) which is eerily on-target in predicitons of balkanization and marginalization ten minutes in the future. After that comes _The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_. This is my favorite story-wise, but the ending kind of sucks. (Hats off to Stephenson as an author, but his endings have a tendancy to be sort of weird and unsatisfyingly anti-climactic) _The Diamond Age_ focuses on the further balkanization of society, set far enough in the future that nano-tech has become cheap and ubiquitous. His newer two offerings are _Cryptonomicon_ (This book is incredible. Admittedly, I'm a number theorist, so I might be biased, but still...) This one is set dually in the present day (or 30 seconds in the future) and during WWII. It focuses on the role of cryptography and data-security in the world. Again, the ending could be better. He has also recently published, both in both tree-medi and available online here an essay about the history of personal computing called _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_. I've gotten mixed reviews on it, but havn't read it yet, so can't really comment. I'd highly recommend you read some of his stuff...I mean, really, what kind of self-resoecting geek doesn't read Stephenson... abszero (sorry I'm AC, I just now noticed)

Who is neil stephenson and why should I be excited? I'm going to assume this a joke, but on the off chance it's not..."have you heard the good word, my brother?" Neil Stephenson is one of the two (IMHO) best cyberpunk authors existant. (The other being, obviously, Wm. Gibson) Cyberpunk is a fairly new (emergant in the early 80s) genre of hard science fiction. It deals (mainly) with the socio-cultural impact of emergent technologies, particularly machine-learning and the internet. (try here for a bio by his publisher or here for a bio apparently aelf-authored.) Stephenson's main works are: _Snow Crash_ (his first big hit) which is eerily on-target in predicitons of balkanization and marginalization ten minutes in the future. After that comes _The Diamond Age, or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_. This is my favorite story-wise, but the ending kind of sucks. (Hats off to Stephenson as an author, but his endings have a tendancy to be sort of weird and unsatisfyingly anti-climactic) _The Diamond Age_ focuses on the further balkanization of society, set far enough in the future that nano-tech has become cheap and ubiquitous. His newer two offerings are _Cryptonomicon_ (This book is incredible. Admittedly, I'm a number theorist, so I might be biased, but still...) This one is set dually in the present day (or 30 seconds in the future) and during WWII. It focuses on the role of cryptography and data-security in the world. Again, the ending could be better. He has also recently published, both in both tree-medi and available online here an essay about the history of personal computing called _In the Beginning Was the Command Line_. I've gotten mixed reviews on it, but havn't read it yet, so can't really comment. I'd highly recommend you read some of his stuff...I mean, really, what kind of self-resoecting geek doesn't read Stephenson... abszero (sorry I'm AC, I just now noticed)

shit. forgot to close the brackets. oh well.
correct link .

We have a story that we think is solid. We don't think anybody could ever sue us for libel. There are some twists and turns, and if you get in front of a jury in some states where the people on that jury are all related to people who work in tobacco companies, look out. That's a $15 billion gun pointed at your head. We may opt to get out of the line of fire. that doesn't make me proud, but it's not my money. I don't have $15 billion.

The suit claimed in part that a researcher for Brown & Williamson tobacco, Jeffrey Wigland, would be in violation of his severance contract's non-disclosure clause. The whole thing is well covered at the story's web page.

If you read Cryptonomicon, you heard a lot about tactical litigation. The way Philip Morris and RJR engaged in "tortious interference" against the corporation attempting to run a news story is another real-world example.

The biggest problem with the 60 Minutes debacle was that the decision to pull the story is that the network was up for sale at the time it was made, and that it was made on the recommendation of corporate executives, not news directors. The chairman of CBS received $12M, the general counsel, who recommended to kill the story, received $1.2M. They would not have made that money if Westinghouse didn't buy CBS at $5.6B, and Westinghouse would not have bought the company if it had a $15B lawsuit hanging over it's head.

Ironically, the story did end up making the news, not directly, but in stories by other news agencies, discussing not the spiking allegation itself, but the tobacco industry's litigious efforts to supress it.

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I think you mean Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon?

You can download a copy of In the Beginning Was the Command Line from Neal Stephenson's site http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning. html in plain text format, or read it nicely reformatted into HTML here.
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You can get the full text of the Neal Stephenson article at this URL: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning. html.

This article was posted on Slashdot a while back, so surely Hemos knows about it. However, instead of freely sharing information, he has opted to put up a link to Fatbrain.com, which earns him money. What happened Open Source, Free Software, and the hacker ethic?

If anyone still doubts that Slashdot content has been affected by the editors' own greed, you can now be sure that they have also been corrupted. Wasn't all the money you earned from the Andover IPO enough for you, Hemos? Or has it just made you even more greedy?

Slashdot is a geek site. I guess that the term "geek" has nothing to do with the hacker ethic anymore. Now a geek is a techie who is profitting from the Internet, at the expense of free sharing of information.

I apologize for the rant, but I am very distressed at what has happened here. How many people will buy the book from Fatbrain, instead of reading it online, as Neal Stephenson has intended?

I doubt Sterling gives a shit what "slashdotters" think about what he writes. He didn't submit this to Slashdot. And I'd guess he likes ranting about as much as persuading so gathering followers is not on the agenda.

I like both Sterling and Stephenson's writings a lot, at this point I may like Stephenson a little more. Sterling's recent books aren't as good as Islands in the Net but Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is one of his best. Stephenson has real, hands-on experience with computers which leads him to writing good stuff like In the Beginning. But what makes you think Stephenson has more insight into society or the human condition than Sterling?

Like Gibson, a lot of the stuff in Stephenson's work, like burbclaves, franchulates, and just about all of Cryptonomicon, is about what is not what could be. The Neo-Victorians were interesting and plausible, but did they seem real? I'm not talking about technology but society, human behavior, and how technology can change it. I think Sterling taps into that stuff much more. Sterling is also constantly expressing what he hopes will be. You may consider that good or bad. I don't mean he literally wants the future to be just like any of his books but that underlying ideologies and attitudes will be found in the future. This manifesto touches on ideas you can find in his earliest work, which is now going back 20 years.

I think it's great that Be may have a niche here. I know that I'll probably get flamed for saying this, but Be isn't terribly likely to make it as a desktop environment. (No more, anyhow, than the Batmobile is likely to make it as the everman's car.)

But as a 'net appliance OS? Fantastic! It's so much more powerful and flexible than WinCE (or whatever they're calling it these days), and, of course, it's not made by Microsoft. (I'll get flamed for that, too. :)

Rejoice!

the crypt (a la cryptonomicon)?

• Make sure that in optimizing the program interface for the two-minute beginner, you haven't pessimized it for the two-year daily-user.
• Keep it touch-typist friendly.
  • Let me keep my eyes on the screen at all times, not on the input peripherals.
  • Mimimize the context switches between mouse and keyboard. It slows me down. I can type much, much faster than I can mouse around.
  • Minimize all required mouse use, because it causes RSI. Let me keep my hands on the homerow as much as possible, not dancing around the funny keys that require me to look down to find, like HOME, END, PAGEUP, etc. Put those on real keys.
• No prior Windows knowledge expected, required, nor in fact, even beneficial.
• All programs, configurations, library functions, and interfaces must be completely documented.
• Never make me do anything tedious and repetitive, like holding some an arrow key or a mouse for a long time just to move a large distance.
  • I shouldn't have to read the library code to figure out how Gtk works, nor existing themes to figure out how to make a new one
  • nor should I have to click on happycons to get some dribbled out set of web pages for how to run or configure a program
  • The documentation should searchable, indexable, typesettable, and printable.
  • Follow POSIX 1003.2 requirements that all commands have a minimal manpage.
• Scriptability. Automatability. All the knobs need to be exposed either via raw text files or else normal CLI programs.
• Respect for the user's existing preferences where applicable.
  • X defaults -- If I have *visualBell: on, then that should suffice for all applications.
  • stty settings -- If I think ^H is what I want to erase a character, don't make me use DEL or ^?, or worse still, the BACKSPACE key (which sends a ^H anyway) yet not Control-H). And if I have my werase set to ^W, pay attention to that, too.
  • Preferred editor -- if I have an editor setting in my environment, don't make me learn a new one just for your program. Most toolkits' text widgets have insultingly idiotic editing abilities -- pop up my preferred editor instead, or at least, give me that option. Perhaps prefered newsreader, shell, mailer, etc should come into play as well, but the sorry excuse for an editor is the most annoying thing.
• A way to leverage existing knowledge of words. This may sound bizarre, but nothing is more frustrating to this Unix user than to have a program pop up a set of seventeen tiny graphical stickpin icons. Don't make me guess what your cutes idea of a neat bitmap for an exit or reload or search button is. Allow me the option of using real words, not happycons. And allow for keyboard shortcuts on all functionality.
• Don't make me suffer through a tedious manual search through scads of cascading menus each time I want to find something. There is no way to search, analyse, or print a cascading menu system. This is insane. A common mechanism provided by the low-level toolkit and managed by the desktop or window manager must be invented. Life is too short for hunt and peck. For example, the window manager could provide a way to search the menus of the current focussed program for a particular text string. That way you never have waste your life on an idiotic recursive but linear visual search.

I am getting tired about hearing how Linux is immune to computer viri [sic; you mean viruses], it simply isn't. The main thing preventing people from writing a Linux virus is good-will towards the operating system.

You are correct that it is no mean trick to write a program that can damage the system it runs on, largely irrespective of what kind of system we're talking about. And so long as you can hoodwink some unwitting user into executing that program on their system, that program can, of course, cause damages commensurate with the privileges and capabilities of that user.

What you've failed to consider is how the dramatic cultural differences between Unix and the much-maligned consumerist toys serve to affect the issue to our benefit and their detriment.

Probably the most important of these cultural differences is that Unix has historically been a source-only world. Programs are distributed in the form of source code, code which shall be configured, built, and ultimately installed on the target machine. Programs solely accessible in machine language form fall immediately under a taint of mistrust.

Think back to the last time you read a notice from someone whom you've never heard of before that was asking you to go fetch some random binary program from some random place on the net and then to run that program under full sysadmin privileges? I can already see the incredulous Unix sysadmin reading that and bursting out in uncontrollable guffaws. Because the de facto standard for program interchange in Unix is as source code, a Unix programmer will be far less likely to fall for your ploy than would your average Prisoner of Bill, who has been lulled into gullibility by a binary-only culture.

But for the sake of the argument, let's say that you've found a way to effect this trick. Suppose you're an employee of some reasonably respected company that happens to produce a binary-only distribution of their commercial software, and you decide to sneak something wicked into the binary image. You manage to replace the standard, clean copy on your company's ftp or http server, or even floppies or CDs, with your own naughty version. People are accustomed to downloading from your company, or using your company's floppies, so they do as they've always done, run the installation as the superuser, and you thereby have your way with their system.

If this scenario were to play out, just how dangerous--how destructive--could it really prove? Whom could you harm, and who would be immune to your ploy? The answer is that you could only hurt those folks running the exact platform for which your binary had been compiled, and everybody is unassailable. By platform, I mean the whole feature vector that includes processor chip (eg Sparc vs Intel), operating system (e.g. SGI vs BSD), shared libraries (e.g. libc vs glibc), and site-specific configuration (e.g. shadowed vs non-shadowed password files.

Let's not get too full of ourselves and pretend that the Unix culture's predilection for source-only program distribution derives only, or even mainly, from altruism. We have no choice in this matter. Consumer-targetted systems from Microsoft or Apple are two instances are a static monoculture, as vulnerable to mayhap as a field of cloned sweet corn. It only takes one genetically engineered virus to bring down the whole field. Unix is different.

In his acclaimed essay, In The Beginning , Neal Stephenson writes:

It is this sort of acculturation that gives Unix hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority captured in the Dilbert cartoon. Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.

What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it. This is very difficult to understand for people who are accustomed to thinking of OSes as things that absolutely have to be bought.

There is no one thing called Unix. Instead, Unix comprises a diverse set of subtly (and often not so subtly) variant platforms. A nefarious binary laced with exquisitely designed evil bullets hidden inside it can hurt only a few of us. When Apple and Microsoft laugh at our diversity, be sure to remind them that is it their lack of the same that contributes to their incredible vulnerability--and to our strength. Hybrid vigor ultimately wins out over a monoculture, for the latter is too in-bred and fragile to prove long viable.

Let me now return to your particular suggestion, that of a malignant Perl program activated by a Makefile rule at installation time. Because you're talking source code, and because Perl tries rather hard to attain a high level cross-platform intercompatibility, this form of subterfuge would appear exempt from the inherent protections stemming from diversity in variant Unix platforms. So, could your trick be done? How much of a problem could this really be? What might happen?

The answer is that of course, it could be done. And in point of fact, a demonstration model is already available, courtesy of Abigail. Guess what? There's no reason to run around like a chicken with its head cut off: the sky isn't falling. This sort of approach stands little chance of making a big splash, because you aren't going to insinuate it into a place that can affect a lot of people. Sure, you might catch a few folks, but just how long to you think this kind of thing will go unnoticed? Remember, it's in source code. That means anybody who wonders what happened can just look at it. There's a very low barrier to entry. And even if the naughtiness removes itself from your copy once its dirty deeds are done, that naughtiness is still sitting there in plain view for easy inspection back wherever you got your copy from.

Is there a way around this? Well, yes, if you're as clever as Ken Thompson. Fortunately, you aren't, and neither are the crackers. If they were, they'd doubtless receive more Turing Awards for their vaunted efforts. :-)

The only way you're going to get good propagation is if your nastiness into a copy that a lot of people will download and install. There's a very fine reason why so many archives contain a checksum of the image. It's to help with this problem. Security of course depends on several matters, including the strength of the algorithm and the integrity of the authenticating agent. But better that than nothing.

Let's talk about propagation some more. I assume that the goal is to have a notable impact, which means you need to spread your bad code as widely as possible. A hacked up install script, even if all goes to your liking, just doesn't have a very high rate of reproduction. First of all, how often do how many people install this software? Secondly, how do you plan to trick them into doing so? It's not really much of a challenge to get one person to this, especially if they trust. If that's your goal, maybe you'll succeed. But the risk of being traced and apprehended is high.

So how come this stuff can spread like wildfire amongst the OS-challenged? Can't whatever mechanism that's used there be used to get at the rest of us, too?

Over the last few years, a frighteningly frequent conduit of contagion for viral infection on toy systems has been the implicit, automatic execution of code with little or not manual intervention on the part of the box's owner. DOWN THIS PATH LIES MADNESS!. That this can ever, ever happen is as a plain a symptom of complete and total cretinization in the toybox world as you are ever going to see. It's stupid, it's crazy, and it's dangerous. Any programmer who even suggests it needs to go back to flipping hamburgers. Any user who asks for this feature needs to be quietly taken into the back room by the doleful men in long trenchcoats, where he will be told in no uncertain terms that his request is not only in the best interest of no one but criminals, but that he also now has a permanent record even for asking about it.

No, I don't care that a customer asked for it. Customers are idiots, just like any other user. So what if they pay you? They're still idiots, and it's your professional responsibility to act responsibly, to refuse to go along with their madnesses. The customer is not always right. In fact, they're very often wrong. A physician or a lawyer doesn't do whatever the customer requests, and neither do you. They, meaning the customers or users, simply don't have the background and training; they don't have the experience of seeing why automatic execution from untrustable source is the work of the Devil.

It's not as though we in Unix have never seen this issue before. In fact, we've seen it time and time again. And guess what? We recognized the problem and we addressed it. And we don't cater to that kind of lunacy anymore.

Here are a few concrete examples.

Remember when vi would--or at least, could--automatically execute macro commands embedded in a file in a specific way? That was a dubious feature called modelines. On my OpenBSD systems, if I type :set modeline, the program comes back and says set: the modeline option may never be turned on.

Another example of learning from our mistakes is the issue of shell archives. Instead of automatically running the sharfile through /bin/sh, there are specially made unshar programs that will do the common things, safely, and nothing else.

When CGI was first getting big, owners of toy systems would blindly install compilers and interpreters in such a way that these would easily execute arbitrary content coming in off the wire. Despite my pleas, both Netscape and Microsoft were actually advocating this! After a year of warning admins not to do this, and sending mail to the companies who were saying to just go ahead, nothing changed. So I released latro. Then and only then did various companies retract their suggestions, even though they'd been aware of the nature of the problem for a long, long time. Sure, you could be equally stupid on Unix, but for some reason, we weren't. History counts.

Implicit execution of untrusted material is simply stupid beyond words. And for some reason, the toybox people keep falling for the same chump moves, from MIME attachments to word processor and spreadsheet macros to embedded active scripting controls. I don't know quite why they just keep doing this crap. My hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that this is happening because Microsoft and their moronic minions simply cannot for the all the tea in China ever manage to think outside of their quaint but completely fictional little single-user universe. Maybe they don't hire people who come from a background in multiuser and/or networked computing systems. Maybe they don't hire people with real experience at all, just script-kiddies trying to make a buck legitimately but with no true understanding. Maybe the software makers simply can't say no to a customer request, no matter how suicidal they know that request to be. I don't know.

Whatever the cause, decades of history are completely and repeatedly ignored. They keep making the same mistakes, and they don't fix the underlying causes. Sure, there are things that are hard. Denial of service attacks are hard. People who know exactly all the ramifications of IP who go sending maliciously hand-crafted packets aren't much fun either.

But these highly technical ploys aren't why most folks on their toyboxes are being screwed up, down, left, right, and sideways. They're being screwed because of very simple matters. They don't have the notion of a protected execution mode. They don't have file permissions or memory protections. They automatically execute content willy-nilly, often with complete access to the whole machine. They expect a program to show up in binary not source form. They don't compare robust checksums from a strongly authenticated sources. They live in an infinitely vulnerable monoculture. They expect things to just magically happen for them without a thought or a care, and guess what? Their wishes are duly granted, much to their eventual dismay.

It is possible that mass-market factors may someday end up plaguing Unix systems in ways not so far removed from the stupidities that the toy boxes are riddled with. We just have to tell them no, and to condemn in the strongest and loudest possible terms any backsliding into insecurities that if we ever had, long ago banished. Looking at the Winix phenomenon, in which a dozen different vendors put together and ship their own Linux operating systems, all specifically constructed to be user-obsequious and Unix-hostile all in order to appease the lowered expectations of a hundred million Windows idiots, who, despite their numbers, really can still be wrong. The stupidity of the masses must never be underestimated.

PS: Congratulations for reading this far. :-)

There is a really fascinating chunk in Neal's In the Beginning... essay about Disney's perfection of "mediated reality". I won't even try to summarize, but everyone on /. should read In the Beginning anyways.

Have you read Stephenson's In the Beginning essay? This is a very thoughtful essay on technology and culture. He also visited Disney (the Magic Kingdom) and had some interesting things to say about corporatization, cultural homogenization, and all the other things that you think about when you hear the word Disney.

Of course his essay isn't "open source" so you can't embrace and extend it. But it should give you an interesting perspective as well as being something entertaining to read on the plane!

JMC

Interesting that Matt Mitche choose to forego installation of XWin - not that I blame him. Based on my own experience as a wee U*IX groupie (several years ago; hasn't improved), configuring should only be attempted in the company of the extraordinarily patient, or the incredibly wise. Preferably both.

Obligatory Link: Neal Stephenson has made some insightful comments on the subject of GUI's in one of his latest Essay.

Unconfirmed Memory: There is some project in the works to solve a lot of the problems involved with XWin. If anyone has more info, pls post!

I'd suggest reading Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" for some ideas - I like his idea of the anarchic crowd in tents, RVs, Quonset huts, etc., all gathered to build tanks.

At least one of the ex-Soviet states attempted to set itself up in this way. Naturally, there are also the Caribbean islands with confidential banking laws and low (no?) taxes. I believe it's a reasonably common method of building revenue.

Unfortunately, one problem when attempting this is the confidence issue. People are very confident that Switzerland will remain, with no major changes to its banking policies. It's much harder to predict the actions of a small nation that has just initiated this sort of policy. The stability and reliance on tradition hasn't been demonstrated. You really don't want the state to start revealing information (or nationalizing assets!).

Naturally, this won't keep all money out. It's also likely (as Neal said) that a higher portion of early adopters will be doing something shady. This gives these small states an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to their policies, especially if larger states fail to pressure the state for information or other violations of policy.

In addition to that, as a number of /. readers may know, In The Beginning There Was the Command Line, an essay of his that had an article on /. a while back, will be published in a book form November 9 according to amazon.

All in all, great review. I was very happy to see someone else associating Neal Stephenson and Neil Gaiman in some way.

-Ari

"I need a .sig quote that's better than this!"

Sorry, that was meant to be Jakob Nielsen's essays (specially The AntiMac Interface) and Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line far more enlightening..

I find Jakob highly overrated (but still far better than this interface hall of shame). I consider Stephenson's essay an absolute must-read.

Alejo

I saw this some months ago. I found it rather superficial. First, it just covers applications that use the Windows widgets (well, perhaps MacOS too? I don't remember). As everybody knows, there are a LOT of different widget sets in the Unix world, where every program used to have it's own before Gnome/KDE. Also, some of the examples there are criticized as interface problems but are just plain bugs. For example, see the Netscape's Spelling Checking `interface problem' (a spell checker that suggest the word where it is reporting mispelled) or the `Error: The operation completed succesfully' window which we just know it's cause by a bug that thinks there was an error when there wasn't and then prints strerror o sys_errlist or whatever the equivalent of that in Windows is. Are those interface-design problems? (I pointed this to the author and he said he things so). Finally, I believe it has way too many examples but I'd like more analyzis. Some papers on interface design would be best. It just shows me many things I should't do (most are obvious) but does not tell me how to design a really good interface. I found Jakob Nielsen's and specially Neal Stephenson's essay on interfaces far more enlightening. Alejo.

There was an article "In the beginning their sic was a command line" by Neal Stephenson (sorry, don't have the URL on me!)

No point recommending it if the URL is lacking :)
It's http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html for the record and it is worth the read.

I'm sorry. I'm a bright person, but I don't think your point got across.

Are you saying you want a machine to think for you? That's what it sounds like. If so, I'd like to
recommend you read In the Beginning was the Command Line again, or for the first time.

My mind is sufficiently advanced to make decisions for me.

Finally, I think the first thing Clotho should do for you is run a grammar check on your writing. I
hate to flame like this, but I find it horribly unprofessional to be a columnist and have so many
errors in your article.

Feh. And generally I like Katz's posts. This one was really lacking, though.
--
"HORSE."

I think we should all go back and read Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was
the Command Line for some insight.

I literally grew up on an Amiga, so I like both the CLI and the GUI at the same time.

i find strange noone has provided the URL of the book, it's http://www.cryptonomicon.com/
also you can read the beginning_print here
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com

I can't imagine why Neal is hanging around the Microsoft campus. He lives in Seattle, but other than that I can think of no motivation for him to be there.

Up until '95, he was a die-hard Mac fan and Mac hacker. Then he had some problems with a laptop and switched to Linux. He loves UN*X, by the way, and has written a manifesto on command line interfaces. You can download it from the promotional site for his latest book.

Disclaimer: I have to inform you all that my name is Jason Stephenson, and I also went to Boston University, a few years after Neal graduated.

I agree that the faq is interesting, but I also liked the interview given the constraints that Andrew acknowledged. I think it might be easier to interview Stephenson by email. There was an excellent long email interview with him in Microtimes around the time Snowcrash came out. Unfortunately, I don't think it is on the web.

.. here or there
well what ever... just read it!

nmarshall
#include STD_DISCLAMER.H
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE

Go here:
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning. html to download a copy zip'd or sit'd.

I largely agree with your article ( http://cgi.pathfinder .com/fortune/technology/alsop/index.html) proposing the elimination of intellectual property. I have a few things to add:

• it needs to be done slowly, over a period of five years or so, to avoid scaring the investors off and risking a backlash.
• trademark is not intended to grant monopolies as patent and copyright are; it is only intended to allow consumers to reliably identify the folks with which they are doing business. Accordingly, I see no reason to eliminate trademark. (Indeed, most of your arguments pertain only to copyright.)
• eliminating copyright for books would more effectively promote the copying of books than eliminating copyright for software would promote copying of software. Since the distributed versions of software often don't include source code (books always include ``source code'') some method is needed to promote its publication. I suggest the method that was used for books: copyright, but with a term of 18 months, so it doesn't unduly inhibit copying. Copyright protection would only be granted to those works of software for which source code was on deposit at the Library of Congress; when the copyright expired, the source code would be released to the public.
• you neglected to detail the harmful effects of current copyright and patent law. Perhaps you didn't have enough space; here are a few:
  • the inevitable creation of harmful monopolies like Microsoft (see http://www.tao.ca/wind/rre/0579.html for more, search for my name); you did mention this briefly, but a reasonable person might conclude, after reading your article, that Microsoft was simply an aberration.
  • the necessity to crack down on freedom of the press in order to maintain copyright. (What's a press? It's a machine for copying speech. How do you maintain copyright in this Brave New World of digital technology? Restrict access to devices for copying speech. Several proposals have already been put forth that do just this, and one of them (the Audio Home Recording Act) has been passed into law in the US.)
  • the ultimate necessity to outlaw private computer-mediated communication in order to detect violations of copyright
  • the high costs to each individual to make sure they aren't violating the law. (In a couple of years, you'll need a J.D. and a couple of paralegals to write a novel computer program without violating any patents.)
  • the chilling effect it has on innovation. (The other way you can avoid violating patents is to not use any techniques that weren't published ten years ago. This won't keep you from getting sued, given the incompetence of the patent office, but it will probably keep you from losing the case. Needless to say, if you can't afford to be sued, you need to find another business to be in. Washing windows is probably a good choice.) This will get worse and worse as more and more patents are granted.

Some of these evils may be excusable if they produce a greater social good -- like encouraging people to innovate and create by offering them financial rewards -- but the evidence is that they actually do the opposite. (Witness the Internet and Linux.)

--
< kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker < http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
-- Neal Stephenson, at http://www.cryptonomicon.com/begi nning_print.html

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/main.html seemed to get me in the site
--

I have to agree with Silmaril above.. it doesn't make sense that this long, literate and excellent essay by an insightful and respected writer gets relegated to a quickie, while Rowan van der Molen's whiny, unfocused rant gets a full article.

If Slashdot is going to have such a lax and sloppy editorial policy (further, and more egregious, examples of which abound) then it might be more interesting to pick articles using the same moderation system that's currently used for comments. If it didn't improve things, at least it would be radical.