Its an axiom in security that if someone physical access to the hardware they can do what they like.
Given the ease of use and portability of a modern laptop you may as well just post a copy of the data to anyone who might be interested.
Stolen laptops are actually the lowest risk area, given that most laptop theives are after the shiny hardware and its so rare to come accross data with any resale value that they probably dont even look. A far greater risk for a high security installation like Los Alamos is someone borrowing a laptop for long enough to install some worm/trojans/keyloging software which the dedicated sceintist can then physically carry through all those firewalls back into the lab.
Any sane security profesional would just plain ban them from a set up with the security requirements of Los Alamos. The best solution would be to have all hardware in a locked server room and only access them via "dumb" terminal servers. Plus a private network with no physical connection to the outside world.
This "Bob Dylan hates digital" stuff is a very commion mis-quote. Whate his Bobness was complaining about was the cheapo pc based mixing software and associated hardware which young musicians were using instead of analog mixers tape decks etc.
And he definately had a point. A combination of low quality hardware, poor digitising algorithms and sloppy mixing does produce audibly awful results compared with say an inexpensive 12 track mixer and a good old tape recorder.
This year more than half of Nokia's revenues come from sub 50 Euro phones.
And this percentage is increasing.
I personally can see why. I want a phone to be a phone nothing more nothing less.
I've has a treo [great palm pilot - lousy phone) and was bought a p800 (lousy PDA, lousy phone).
I now have a Nokia 5nnn thingy with the bouncy rubber case which comes with a camera I have never used, an FM radio I have never used, a compass! which I have used and some other bells and whistles but it works very well as a phone.
I will spend even less money the next time I buy one and get more of what I really want from the thing -- simple user interface and long battery life.
Arrgh. You yanks seem to have gotten Islam mixed up with satanism and the klingons.
There are approx zero Islamic countries in the world where you cannot freely follow another religion.
There are about two countries where it is compulsery for Muslims to practice Islam.
There are about four countries where strict Koranic law does not allow a Muslim to convert to another religion.
There are about six or seven countries where you are not allowed to activly seek converts from Islam.
Thre are about 50 countries where Muslims form the majority of the population.
This all compares pretty well with majority christian states.
The most extreme example is Saudi Arabia (possibly the closest ally the US has) , however as the Saudi Arabian state sees itself as the Guardian of Mecca you can view it as an vastly overgrown version of the Vatican state.
Last time I had a problem with my Uninspiron the Dell techie instructed me to open up the front remove a few parts and reseat the screen conection. When I expressed surprise he said this was Dells standard troubleshhooting procedure.
Car metaphors:-
OS-X -- Lexus - overpriced but kool.
Win XP. -- 2001 GM - cheap but uncool.
Win Vista -- 2007 Cadilac -- overpriced but still uncool.
Linux -- Ford pickup -- cheap, sort of kool anti-cool.
Back in the 70s when they replaced the super successful 360 series they used "microcode" to translate the old 360 instructions into instructions understood by the new hardware -- and -- are still doing this today for zSeries.
This was a very good thing as the 360 instruction set and associoated tooling was a work of art.
The big problem with NT is its "Message Passing" architecture, whereby various components of the OS talk to each other by putting messages on queues (In the *nux model you just call the function you need.)
The weakness of the architecture is that the component handling any one message queue is automatically single threaded and tied to a single processor. Which is OK for 2 or four processor systems but in 16 or 34 processor systems 12 or 30 of your processors are wasted.
However I expect the idea of any resources being available to the application is an anathema to Redmond so they will fix this problem to ensure that VISTA keeps its design goal to consume 90% of available resources.
'I hope you are not inferring that 'foreigners and ex-colonists are inferior' at Cricket.'
Absolutely not. The juxtaposition of the sentences was totally accidental. Besides being Scottish I feel totally unqualified to judge inferiority or superiority at cricket. As far as I can work out the weather has the best team ".. rain stopped play."
We brits have no need to attract terrorists are we are self sufficient in this area although we don't export that many.
As for the goods thing we do, well, its much the same as your list:-
Invade Afganistan.
Invade Iraq.
Murdoch dominated media.
etc. etc.
Plus a few extras like:-
Inflicting cricket on half the world (technically only the English are culpable for this). We dont have a national dress anymore as all the world is stuffed into suits and ties -- this surely counts as the most pervasive and uncofrotable example of "cultural imperialism" ever. The Spice Girls (we are truly sorry about Posh Spice - but very glad she is now living in LA). etc. etc.
On the other hand: We nearly always apologetic about invading someones country, sinking thier fleet, bombing thier cities etc. etc. We accept that foriegners and ex-colonists are inferior so are carefull not to criticise them. We try to be polite and orderly when in someone elses country (when sober!). We only pick fights with with people who want to fight and/or the riot police (when drunk!).
In this way we are nearly always welcome back, and, have have the world lining up to take up residense in our damp miserabl eover priced country.
Rather than screening people coming into the USA why not screen people leaving the USA.
You could come up with a standardised "AQ" (Asshole Quotent) score and refuse exit to anyone scoring more than 100.
Answering "Yes" to questions like "Do you believe there should be Starbucks outlet in every culturaly important site" gets you five points.
Aswering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe it is acceptable to shout out 'Does anyone in this joint speak English' when visting a foriegn art gallery" get you ten points.
Answering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe its wrong to provide condoms to people who are HIV positive" gets you 50 points.
By screening people leaving your country in this way you could promote the illusion that USAians are polite considerate respectfull people and you hatred and bombs would be better directed at Candadians or Swedes.
Also candidates for high office could boast about thier high scores come lection time.
"Most of that is pretty mature stuff" - not really especially gcc, If you want to take full advantage of the latest 64bit multicore hardware you need a compliler that compiles to the latest instruction set.
I would pretty much guarentee that the core GNU tool set -- bash, gcc, nmake, emacs, GTK, GIMP etc. will go GPL 3 as soon as is practical.
These tools are written and maintained by RMS et al. who have an idealogical commitment to GPL 3 and Open Source and dont really care about market share etc.
So if Suse want to distribute a linux minus the tools, the compilers and a major desktop environment good luck to them.
Incidently there is a business principle so basic I dont think it is even mentioned in self help management books:- "Dont sue your customers" you may win the law suit but you will have an ex customer for sure. So the chances of a real cutomer being sued by MS are practicaly 0.
You should relly question how getting the copyright on "Winnie the Pooh" extended by 50 years benefits creativity. The original author is long dead, his family sold the rights to Disney for a pittance in the '60s. So all that is being protected is Disneys right to make money.
Question:- Which language is your operatings system written in ? answer C (if your box doesnt have IBM written on it.). Q. What language is you JVM written in? A. C. Q. What language is your langauge written in? -- A. C if you are using Python, Perl,PHP, Ruby.
I think C will outlive all other computer languages in use today.
As for COBOL it is the long goodbye, the number of serious COBOL applications has dwindled from millions to mere hundreds of thousands, and will probably be overtaken by Java sometime in the next five years. The main reason for the longlevity of COBOL -- it was the only language that could do fixed point arithmetic correctly -- will no longer true as C, C#, C++ Java et al. are finally going to get built in support for decimal arithmatic sometime this year.
And SNA I will miss you, those "bits 17 - 21 represent " those wonderful 15 hex digit parameters where every bit was significant, the "default to the last value used" syntax.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time some blogger makes a fuss about not being treated like "real" journalists just point them to the Cringley/McKraken articles.
They will be treated like journalists when they can demonstratte some ethical and professional resposibility.
Not that all journalists are perfect but they do lose thier jobs when they get caught red handed.
Anyway all the best blogs are deeply personal, opinionated, and, do not pretend to be journalism.
Its an axiom in security that if someone physical access to the hardware they can do what they like.
Given the ease of use and portability of a modern laptop you may as well just post a copy of the data to anyone who might be interested.
Stolen laptops are actually the lowest risk area, given that most laptop theives are after the shiny hardware and its so rare to come accross data with any resale value that they probably dont even look. A far greater risk for a high security installation like Los Alamos is someone borrowing a laptop for long enough to install some worm/trojans/keyloging software which the dedicated sceintist can then physically carry through all those firewalls back into the lab.
Any sane security profesional would just plain ban them from a set up with the security requirements of Los Alamos.
The best solution would be to have all hardware in a locked server room and only access them via "dumb" terminal servers. Plus a private network with no physical connection to the outside world.
This "Bob Dylan hates digital" stuff is a very commion mis-quote.
Whate his Bobness was complaining about was the cheapo pc based mixing software and
associated hardware which young musicians were using instead of analog mixers tape decks etc.
And he definately had a point. A combination of low quality hardware, poor digitising algorithms
and sloppy mixing does produce audibly awful results compared with say an inexpensive 12 track mixer
and a good old tape recorder.
This year more than half of Nokia's revenues come from sub 50 Euro phones.
And this percentage is increasing.
I personally can see why. I want a phone to be a phone nothing more nothing less.
I've has a treo [great palm pilot - lousy phone) and was bought a p800 (lousy PDA, lousy phone).
I now have a Nokia 5nnn thingy with the bouncy rubber case which comes with a camera I
have never used, an FM radio I have never used, a compass! which I have used and some other
bells and whistles but it works very well as a phone.
I will spend even less money the next time I buy one and get more of what I really
want from the thing -- simple user interface and long battery life.
Arrgh. You yanks seem to have gotten Islam mixed up with satanism and the klingons.
There are approx zero Islamic countries in the world where you cannot freely follow another religion.
There are about two countries where it is compulsery for Muslims to practice Islam.
There are about four countries where strict Koranic law does not allow a Muslim to convert to another religion.
There are about six or seven countries where you are not allowed to activly seek converts from Islam.
Thre are about 50 countries where Muslims form the majority of the population.
This all compares pretty well with majority christian states.
The most extreme example is Saudi Arabia (possibly the closest ally the US has) , however as the Saudi Arabian state sees itself as the Guardian of Mecca you can view it as an vastly overgrown version of the Vatican state.
Expensive little toy from Rational.
It profiles memory allocation on existing executables.
Produces thousands of lines of output, most of which you can ignore after revewing the code, but it does catch almost everything.
Last time I had a problem with my Uninspiron the Dell techie instructed me to open up the
front remove a few parts and reseat the screen conection.
When I expressed surprise he said this was Dells standard troubleshhooting procedure.
Car metaphors:-
OS-X -- Lexus - overpriced but kool.
Win XP. -- 2001 GM - cheap but uncool.
Win Vista -- 2007 Cadilac -- overpriced but still uncool.
Linux -- Ford pickup -- cheap, sort of kool anti-cool.
.. but the idea is so old the patent has expired.
Back in the 70s when they replaced the super successful 360 series
they used "microcode" to translate the old 360 instructions into instructions
understood by the new hardware -- and -- are still doing this today for zSeries.
This was a very good thing as the 360 instruction set and associoated tooling
was a work of art.
... wouldn't it be easier to look up the IP address and persuade the ISP to hand over the user details?
The old ways are often the best.
Resources hogged by the OS are not resources "used".
The OS is there to provide services for the applications.
Even better of they responded to those Viagra spams.
5 times a night for 65 years -- still not quite what he deserves.
NT has always been a multiprocessor OS.
The big problem with NT is its "Message Passing" architecture, whereby
various components of the OS talk to each other by putting messages on queues
(In the *nux model you just call the function you need.)
The weakness of the architecture is that the component handling any one
message queue is automatically single threaded and tied to a single processor.
Which is OK for 2 or four processor systems but in 16 or 34 processor
systems 12 or 30 of your processors are wasted.
However I expect the idea of any resources being available to the application
is an anathema to Redmond so they will fix this problem to ensure that VISTA
keeps its design goal to consume 90% of available resources.
'I hope you are not inferring that 'foreigners and ex-colonists are inferior' at Cricket.'
.. rain stopped play."
Absolutely not. The juxtaposition of the sentences was totally accidental.
Besides being Scottish I feel totally unqualified to judge inferiority or superiority
at cricket. As far as I can work out the weather has the best team "
I am British and niether racist nor a coward.
We brits have no need to attract terrorists are we are self sufficient in this area
although we don't export that many.
As for the goods thing we do, well, its much the same as your list:-
Invade Afganistan.
Invade Iraq.
Murdoch dominated media.
etc. etc.
Plus a few extras like:-
Inflicting cricket on half the world (technically only the English are culpable for this).
We dont have a national dress anymore as all the world is stuffed into suits and ties -- this surely counts as the most pervasive and uncofrotable example of "cultural imperialism" ever.
The Spice Girls (we are truly sorry about Posh Spice - but very glad she is now living in LA).
etc. etc.
On the other hand:
We nearly always apologetic about invading someones country, sinking thier fleet, bombing thier cities etc. etc.
We accept that foriegners and ex-colonists are inferior so are carefull not to criticise them.
We try to be polite and orderly when in someone elses country (when sober!).
We only pick fights with with people who want to fight and/or the riot police (when drunk!).
In this way we are nearly always welcome back, and, have have the world lining up to take up residense
in our damp miserabl eover priced country.
Go figure.
I know it deserves more points but as far as I can work out there is already a starbucks at every tourist attraction.
There is certainly a Starbuck in hte heart of the Forbidden City in Biejing.
Rather than screening people coming into the USA why not screen people leaving the USA.
You could come up with a standardised "AQ" (Asshole Quotent) score and refuse exit to anyone scoring more than 100.
Answering "Yes" to questions like "Do you believe there should be Starbucks outlet in every culturaly important site" gets you five points.
Aswering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe it is acceptable to shout out 'Does anyone in this joint speak English' when visting a foriegn art gallery" get you ten points.
Answering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe its wrong to provide condoms to people who are HIV positive" gets you 50 points.
By screening people leaving your country in this way you could promote the illusion that USAians are polite considerate respectfull people and you hatred and bombs would be better directed at Candadians or Swedes.
Also candidates for high office could boast about thier high scores come lection time.
"Most of that is pretty mature stuff" - not really especially gcc,
If you want to take full advantage of the latest 64bit multicore hardware
you need a compliler that compiles to the latest instruction set.
I know from experience table top bar room games they had a while back.
Spend more than a couple of dollars and you need a day or two ro straighten up.
Got backache -- here swallow this tablet PC.
To drastically over simplify the GPL3 -- you can't use it with patented software.
I would pretty much guarentee that the core GNU tool set -- bash, gcc, nmake, emacs, GTK, GIMP etc. will go GPL 3
:- "Dont sue your customers" you may win the law suit but you will have an ex customer for sure. So the chances of a real cutomer being sued by MS are practicaly 0.
as soon as is practical.
These tools are written and maintained by RMS et al. who have an idealogical commitment to GPL 3 and Open Source and dont really care about market share etc.
So if Suse want to distribute a linux minus the tools, the compilers and a major desktop environment good luck to them.
Incidently there is a business principle so basic I dont think it is even mentioned in self help management books
Mod parent up hes got it exactly right.
You should relly question how getting the copyright on "Winnie the Pooh" extended
by 50 years benefits creativity.
The original author is long dead, his family sold the rights to Disney for a pittance
in the '60s. So all that is being protected is Disneys right to make money.
Question:- Which language is your operatings system written in ? answer C (if your box doesnt have IBM written on it.). ,PHP, Ruby.
Q. What language is you JVM written in? A. C.
Q. What language is your langauge written in? -- A. C if you are using Python, Perl
I think C will outlive all other computer languages in use today.
As for COBOL it is the long goodbye, the number of serious COBOL applications
has dwindled from millions to mere hundreds of thousands, and will probably be
overtaken by Java sometime in the next five years.
The main reason for the longlevity of COBOL -- it was the only language that could do fixed point arithmetic correctly -- will no longer true as C, C#, C++ Java et al. are finally going to get built in support
for decimal arithmatic sometime this year.
And SNA I will miss you, those "bits 17 - 21 represent " those wonderful 15 hex digit parameters where
every bit was significant, the "default to the last value used" syntax.
Foriegners may degenerate into efficient but rather unpleasent police states, but,
we British are evolving towards a Traffic Warden State.
Awfully sorry to bother you but is this the right queue for confessing thought crimes?