Slashdot Mirror

If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it.

Looks like they used a Multics box at MIT. http://www.frankston.com/public/?name=ImplementingVisiCalc

Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools.

Really?
http://developer.android.com/tools/sdk/eclipse-adt.html
https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/IDEs/Conceptual/iOS_Simulator_Guide/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator/GettingStartedwithiOSStimulator.html

Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit

Rather subjective. They do quite a bit more than Apple DOS or MS-DOS ever did.

fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets

Same as it ever was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King's_Quest

a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day

Ever use a BBS back in the day?

the world-changing technology the PC made possible

The PC made computing accessible to commonfolk where it was previously the province of large institutions. Mobile continues this trend.

With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since.

We invented a new platform. Web Applications and APIs facilitated by cheap, commodity hardware have changed the nature of human communications and learning in the last 15 years.

distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery

Huh? None of those are proprietary. If a young person chose to learn about and use Haskell, I think they'd be well-equipped to learn quite a lot about how computers work.

Well, filling in a bunch of formulas IS a form of dataflow programming.

It is easy for non-programmers because it quite closely maps real-world calculations on a sheet of paper to the computer screen - just fill in the initial values and write down formulas without worrying about operations ordering. VisiCalc and those who polished the concept after them did a pretty nice job.

On a side note, Visicalc authors' notes make for quite an interesting read.

A nice blog-post on this can be found here.

Here is some info on the implementation of VisiCalc: http://www.frankston.com/?name=implementingVisical c It's a very interesting article by the other author Bob Frankston.

Read this website several months ago and it's quite detailed. Maybe more than you wanted to know but it's very detailed and is a good read.

Implementing Visicalc

He's got a more generic article about what he means with "edge". It looks to have a bit more generic reading value than the article referenced here on slashdot.

Reinout

The real issue is our inability to manage our availability. As long as we give everyone our "magic" name, they have full access to us. EMail addresses don't represent physical resources. We can manage our names and thus manage others' access to us. Unlike paper mail or the telephone network, email gives us the technology to start to take charge of our availibility. Hunting for spammers might help vent our anger but only exacerbates the problem since the question of what is spam is a function of our relationships and our interests. Any static attempt to classify others as simply good or bad only makes the problem more difficult, especially if we let spam filters make the decisions for us.

As Bob Frankston has been saying and saying and saying: "The solution is very simple. Just separate the technical mechanism of the handles from their role as names. This can be done within the existing system by just assigning meaningless identifiers, such as numbers, instead of words. We already have the example of phone numbers that don't have any relationship to names."
And still no one is listening!

Therefore, the strategy is not to build the super-fort, the one that keeps bad guys out no matter what. That doesn't work.

Instead, modern thinking on security is all about layered defenses which raise the cost of attack to (hopefully) unacceptable levels to the attacker(s), as well as preserving flexability and resiliancy.

Although IANAMH (I am not a military historian), I have read enough to generally agree with these ideas. I don't disagree with Schneyer's main thesis, I just am not that surprised by it.

Here is a fairly interesting article called From Sandbags to Computers: What's New in Field Fortifications and Protective Structures. Maybe we can analogize some of modern military tactical theory to cyber-defense.

---
In a hundred-mile march,

Tim