Heh, this was 1990. There was no applescript. And there probably woulda been a bandwidth problem, since many nodes at this time were LocalTalk, backboned onto Thinnet through fastpaths.
Those were the days, reading USENET with a Hypercard stack newsreader...and it felt so superior to doing it on a VT100 in the labs.
If you buy the idea that spammers are behind many of the recent worm/viruses, designed to turn machines into spam zombies, it's also probably reasonable to conclude that Windows isn't exactly a reliable platform to trojan; I'd bet a lot of trojans fail to infect properly simply due to Windows problems. And then there's the problem AV software, many of the machines being behind firewalls/NAT and being unreachable. And then there's people turning their PC's off when they don't use them.
OSS machines, however, are a much more reliable computing environment, meaning that any trojans are actually like to work, and work well. And I'd also wager that many OSS machines are used AS firewalls or bastion machines, and if compromised are easily accessable for spamming or use as stepping stones to other machines. And many of these machines are always on -- you don't have to worry about lack of reliability from disabled machines.
This makes more sense to me than any other conspiracy.
Manferdelli is the general manager for Windows security at Microsoft, and his presentation was mostly about the technical, not ethical or other considerations involved in this system. His position is understandably different from those of privacy and free software advocates who assert that Microsoft's elaborate security is designed to lock users into Microsoft software at the expense of privacy and choice.
This is a classic example of a propaganda technique. An organization with an goal that is unpopular casts a spokesman as an authority on that goal, but only on a narrowly defined scope. This serves to limit the terms of the debate, as well as to get people to accept tenets of the organizations goals.
In this case, Manferdelli is only an expert on the technical aspects of secure computing. The concept of secure computing is something that a lot of people opposed to Palladium actually accept. It's possible to win converts or at least marshall good PR by getting people to "agree" with Microsoft's technical goals, even when they disagree with the larger implementation and motivation.
This technique is common in totalitarian countries. For example, you may be opposed to Nazi eugenics, but Dr. X, who is only an expert on the medical problems associated with poor breeding, can quickly have you agreeing that birth defects and disease are bad. Once you're that far, why, the overall issues and conclusions of eugenics are much more reasonable and less objectionable.
Overall, this technique works great, and you might even find it in use in your place of work. You limit the scope of debate, removing the things that people really object to, and then get them to agree to things "on their own merits", which makes the overall plan more palatable.
When I worked at a University in 89-90, we had a huge campuswide Appletalk network, which meant that every printer on campus was accessable via the Chooser.
A colleague and I always thought it'd be hilarious spam the printers simultaneously, especially if it was done over a holiday -- we figured it'd make the student newspaper when thousands of pages were found the next day all over campus.
Rather than the obvious porn or other imagery, we thought it would have been more fun if we had come up with a "message" of 20-30 words, with each word being printed in 72 pt. type on a different printer to see if anyone would have had enough of a clue to put all the words together to find the message.
We never did it, though, as we weren't talented enough to figure out how to spam the data without the chance of someone seeing our home zones appearing in a printer busy dialog box.
I can reasonably believe that it's possible to gain untracable net access, especially if it involves hacked servers, fraudulently obtained 'net access or spam zombies. Logs only are kept so long and there are legitimate dead ends one can run into, especially when it involves hacked systems and zombies.
What I don't get is why no one is bothering to follow the money trail here, at the very least the commerce department or the FBI. I know that the credit card companies and their associated banks have a bad reputation when it comes to soaking card accepters (ie, businesses) for the losses one might more logically assign to the credit issuers or the banks.
If the crux of the problem really is transnational criminals and credit fraud, another possible solution might be "region coding" credit cards. A card issued in region A cannot be used to purchase goods or services from another region or shipped outside region A, unless the card holder specifically designates their card to be "region free". This would be of near zero inconvenience for most people unless they were heavily involved in transregional travel or purchasing.
But it might be a huge obstacle for people using stolen credit cards internationally, since they would have to come up with much more complicated means of using the cards. And if spam itself is truly an international phenomenon, this could also put a limit on spammers ability to rip off customers or traffic in stolen credit information.
Of course the story does have merit if "India" eq "Bad", and if that's the racist slant the Slashdot is pushing on its front page then the editors should reconsider.
Why is being opposed to shipping jobs off to India automatically the equivilent of being racist? That's really an unfair way to attempt to color the debate about where this work should be done and by whom.
In fact it can be argued that shipping jobs overseas is *more* racist than keeping them here. By increasing the demand for IT work in the US, you draw more workers to the field, either from the pool of the unemployed or from other fields. Since more are likely to be drawn from other fields, you actually create openings for jobs, and these new openings could actually be filled by minorities and others who have a longer history of underemployment.
By shipping formerly high-paying jobs to India, you increase pressure on "good" jobs here in the US and decrease the opportunity for minorities here in the US.
I was actually hopeful in the late 90s that perhaps we were at the point where employment demand would reach a point where we could get the unemployment levels down for minorities to levels consistant with whites now. I guess not, I guess we care more about Indians than Americans of all colors.
I think you're right, and I also think that revolutionaries are willing to sacrifice monopoly exclusionary behavior in the name of adoption or openness, which seems to be critical at getting new technology going. You can introduce a new monopoly technology, but you need a monopoly to introduce it into (eg, Win2k for Win98).
Of course, in general, pharmacists add value to the system -- they advise and help people avoid dangerous drug interactions and such.
When have you EVER gotten any meaningful advice from a pharmacist on anything? Let's assume, that unlike almost every pharmacy I've ever been in, the pharmacist isn't backed up with 100 orders and on the phone constantly.
When I've tried to talk to them, I get two generic answers: "Your doctor will have to answer those questions" and "The PDR doesn't describe any specific drug interactions or side effects".
And not to blame pharmacists, since (A) they don't want to give medical advice, since they're not medical doctors, and (B) they only want to give out "solid", "factual" information.
But, AFAIC, they're just licensed pill counters, they're not really much of a source of information or advice. They have a nicely enforced monopoly on their services, too, which guarantees them work and (education, licensing) helps keep the pool of potential workers small and the paychecks big.
"When I was a kid"(TM) in the early 1970s, there was much less advertising on television and watching television wasn't as obnoxious as it was. Even network-broadcast movies only had a 2-3 commercial breaks per hour, with long stretches of movie in between.
There's a lot more advertising on TV, and a lot more obnoxious advertising gimmicks. I can't help but think that if TV advertising was the same way it was in the 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of paying for a DVR wouldn't be as appealing as the advertising wasn't as obnoxious, it was more of a fair bargain.
But then there's some questions about content, too -- broadcast television used to make some weighty programming. Now it sucks, and if you want anything interesting, you need to have HBO or Showtime for drama, and Tivo and 400 other channels for anything else.
NAFTA only applies when corporations want to move jobs to Mexico for cheap labor. It doesn't apply when it gets in the way of corporate profit guarantees.
Ok, so Americanshave a constitionally guaranteed right to bear arms in their own country, and this is a good thing, but no way can Johnny Foreigner be allowed that same right in his own country?
Not during a state of active combat. The rules of orderly civil society don't apply during a time of war. Even in the US they didn't apply, despite the fact that the US did not host an active field of battle.
If the Chinese market makes enough money for selling there to be profitable, then you can be sure that the overall margins are being propped up by extremely high margin sales in richer countries.
Isn't this also the same rationale used for region coding with DVDs? They're sold in high piracy markets for much lower prices, which are still profitable for their makers, and the region coding protects their high margin markets from imports.
And the same is true for drugs and a host of other things sold overseas. Have the US/Japan/Europe make the real profit and subsidize low-margin (but not unprofitable) Third World markets. Use legislation to enforce this model. Profit!!
I'm sure "real" race fans would never go for this, but NASCAR has gotten lamer and lamer as the number of safety restrictions have gone up; the only "real" racing is on short tracks anymore, and those are rapidly in decline as NASCAR moves races out of the hills into big, fast, new superspeedway style tracks.
The cars are so hobbled by aerodynamics rules and sometimes even restrictor plates that you don't get racing, you get single-file drafting and a ton of pit strategy, and neither is exciting racing. Competitive pits can be exciting, but pit strategy isn't per se, and neither is a long line of cars going round in circles.
Having the drivers race their cars via advanced simulators would eliminate the need for many of the safety enhancements; the owners would drive crash prevention via economics, not "concern for drivers" since no drivers would ever get hurt. Drivers could drive much more aggressively and the cars could be given much more competitive power bands.
It's not "real" racing, but from a distance does it matter if there's a person in the car or not?
How do you explain to a robot the difference between an enemy and a civilian........ In the middle east a shepard has a beard, a turban and a kalashnikov. Enemy troops has a beard, a turban and a kalashnikov.
You call anyone with a Kalishnikov an enemy and kill them all. Don't want to get killed? Leave your AK in your hut, bury it under a rock, but if you carry it, expect to get engaged as a combatant. Combatants carry weapons, non-combatants don't.
Allowing non-combatants to carry arms only creates the situations where troops kill civilians.
I do certianly notice a difference between a DVD at 720p on the TV versus watching the same movie via high def at 1080i via HBO's HD channel or any of the local channels that broadcast movies in HD.
What are you talking about? DVDs are all 720x480 resolution. Even on the best player, they're all 480p at best. Your set may upconvert it to 720p if it does that, but just scaling it doesn't make it 720p.
And a real 720p is preferred by many to 1080i, since it lacks 1080's interlacing. AFAICT most anything with a glass tube is doing 1080i and anything LCD or Plasma is doing 720p, including the Samsung DLPs, and in the case of the LCDs, Plasmas and DLPs, 720p is their maximum resolution.
You're new here, aren't you? Management is cheap, not lazy. Redundancy means that when something breaks they save money by not fixing it, not that they can keep running while they do fix it.
They delays in repair may also be due to the bids they have out to fix it: A Greek sponge diver, the "Polynesian" pearl diver from an unnamed Florida amusement park and a crew from Bangalore with no diving experience or equipment, but a willingness to follow the diving script. There's also a chance that an unnamed "muff diver" may be employed as well, but executives are downplaying it as part of their don't ask, don't tell policy.
Management originally wanted the crew from "Ghost Ship" because the chick was hot, but when they found out it was only a movie they had to look elsewhere.
But do you need more than this bootstrapping capability, which could be easily provided by a OS image? Mounting remote disks involves at least NFS and SMB shares, and you need a basic root filesystem as well. This looks very OS-dependant. More importantly, it's error prone. We can expect bug reports on bugtrag soon...
There is a fine line between too much OS in the firmware and not enough. However, I think it'd be highly valuable to be able to use something like dd to copy a disk's image over the network to either re-image a local HDD or to try to rescue a failed one.
Given the modularity of a unix-like CLI environment, 10MB of firmware would easily be adequate for a healthy "rescue/install" image. Given what's going on in name brand servers (like HPaq's Remote Insight II boards), perhaps a management card is a better place for these things as it can integrate other management functions, but those cards right now can't do stuff like access the disk systems.
As usual, one man's "not enough" is another man's "too much", but that's where modularity may be the ticket -- you don't HAVE to have it, but as long as there's enough open modularity, you can have it if you want.
It's been so long since I've bought a new computer (going on 4 years now), do any BIOS support boot from USB or Firewire yet? I'm not sure an OS would support it, but it'd be worthwhile, and I'm kind of thinking my next machine will be all Firewire or USB2, and this would make it a reality.
There's already rudimentary IP support in many NICs that can boot off the network. It's mostly a DHCP client that grabs a more defined boot image, but there's a lot of good reasons for wanting a better environment in firmware on PCs, including NICs -- how about being able to mount disks, or dd images across a network without ANY OS, and without a DHCP server or other helper to deliver a boot image?
I don't think it'd ever be a total operating environment, and the BIOS code is shelved by the time the machine actually loads a real operating system, so run-time paranoia is probably pretty limited.
Personally, I'd like to see the whole system open and modular, so that the hardware setup and diagnostics portion of the BIOS stayed more or less like it is, and have the firmware environment replacable with BSD/Linux microsystems, Windows microsystems or other flash-resident environments that can be used for diagnostics, setup, recovery, etc.
Some newer office spaces geared towards very small businesses (5-10 people) often have "built-in" networking and phone services. You get your own LAN, internet access, and phone service for some add-on price to your monthly rent.
The problem with this model is that really requires that the building's office layout be fairly static. Many US office buildings, especially the larger ones, are huge empty spaces, made up mainly of cubicles, and even the "real" offices are made of modular partition panels. Since the layout is modular, the network generally can't come with the building.
And even if the old tenant had wiring roughly where you wanted it to be (give or take an extra long drop cable), the cabling is often not up to any standard, poorly labeled, badly done, etc etc.
A lot of building managers *are* hard-assed when it comes to riser space. Our Cal office must use just one riser tech, which is a nightmare when you're trying to schedule telco, a system vendor, and the offical riser techs in one day. Getting one to show up on time is a miracle, three?
You won't be owning a DVD drive for a while, then. The competition is still going strong. I'm somewhat skeptical that -R/RW will vanquish +R/RW, mainly due to the overwhelming market penetration of the +R/+RW consortium (Philips, Dell, HP).
On the other hand, -R seems to be the media format of choice for people in the content industry, and -Rs backers are no slouches, either (Panasonic, Toshiba, Pioneer, and sometimes Sony, whose set-top DVD recorder supports -R/RW and +RW but not +R).
I'm only speculating, but is it that hard to imagine? GM wants profits, not end-user privacy. The FBI wants spying power, not bureaucratic financial efficiency.
I wonder if the Feds will mandate that future versions of this system have the capability to spy on the customer and still work as provided?
The deal's already been made. The FBI agrees to buy a new fleet of Suburbans and in exchange they get OnSpy redesigned to allow for snooping and concurrent emergency functionality.
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Heh, this was 1990. There was no applescript. And there probably woulda been a bandwidth problem, since many nodes at this time were LocalTalk, backboned onto Thinnet through fastpaths.
Those were the days, reading USENET with a Hypercard stack newsreader...and it felt so superior to doing it on a VT100 in the labs.
If you buy the idea that spammers are behind many of the recent worm/viruses, designed to turn machines into spam zombies, it's also probably reasonable to conclude that Windows isn't exactly a reliable platform to trojan; I'd bet a lot of trojans fail to infect properly simply due to Windows problems. And then there's the problem AV software, many of the machines being behind firewalls/NAT and being unreachable. And then there's people turning their PC's off when they don't use them.
OSS machines, however, are a much more reliable computing environment, meaning that any trojans are actually like to work, and work well. And I'd also wager that many OSS machines are used AS firewalls or bastion machines, and if compromised are easily accessable for spamming or use as stepping stones to other machines. And many of these machines are always on -- you don't have to worry about lack of reliability from disabled machines.
This makes more sense to me than any other conspiracy.
Manferdelli is the general manager for Windows security at Microsoft, and his presentation was mostly about the technical, not ethical or other considerations involved in this system. His position is understandably different from those of privacy and free software advocates who assert that Microsoft's elaborate security is designed to lock users into Microsoft software at the expense of privacy and choice.
This is a classic example of a propaganda technique. An organization with an goal that is unpopular casts a spokesman as an authority on that goal, but only on a narrowly defined scope. This serves to limit the terms of the debate, as well as to get people to accept tenets of the organizations goals.
In this case, Manferdelli is only an expert on the technical aspects of secure computing. The concept of secure computing is something that a lot of people opposed to Palladium actually accept. It's possible to win converts or at least marshall good PR by getting people to "agree" with Microsoft's technical goals, even when they disagree with the larger implementation and motivation.
This technique is common in totalitarian countries. For example, you may be opposed to Nazi eugenics, but Dr. X, who is only an expert on the medical problems associated with poor breeding, can quickly have you agreeing that birth defects and disease are bad. Once you're that far, why, the overall issues and conclusions of eugenics are much more reasonable and less objectionable.
Overall, this technique works great, and you might even find it in use in your place of work. You limit the scope of debate, removing the things that people really object to, and then get them to agree to things "on their own merits", which makes the overall plan more palatable.
When I worked at a University in 89-90, we had a huge campuswide Appletalk network, which meant that every printer on campus was accessable via the Chooser.
A colleague and I always thought it'd be hilarious spam the printers simultaneously, especially if it was done over a holiday -- we figured it'd make the student newspaper when thousands of pages were found the next day all over campus.
Rather than the obvious porn or other imagery, we thought it would have been more fun if we had come up with a "message" of 20-30 words, with each word being printed in 72 pt. type on a different printer to see if anyone would have had enough of a clue to put all the words together to find the message.
We never did it, though, as we weren't talented enough to figure out how to spam the data without the chance of someone seeing our home zones appearing in a printer busy dialog box.
I can reasonably believe that it's possible to gain untracable net access, especially if it involves hacked servers, fraudulently obtained 'net access or spam zombies. Logs only are kept so long and there are legitimate dead ends one can run into, especially when it involves hacked systems and zombies.
What I don't get is why no one is bothering to follow the money trail here, at the very least the commerce department or the FBI. I know that the credit card companies and their associated banks have a bad reputation when it comes to soaking card accepters (ie, businesses) for the losses one might more logically assign to the credit issuers or the banks.
If the crux of the problem really is transnational criminals and credit fraud, another possible solution might be "region coding" credit cards. A card issued in region A cannot be used to purchase goods or services from another region or shipped outside region A, unless the card holder specifically designates their card to be "region free". This would be of near zero inconvenience for most people unless they were heavily involved in transregional travel or purchasing.
But it might be a huge obstacle for people using stolen credit cards internationally, since they would have to come up with much more complicated means of using the cards. And if spam itself is truly an international phenomenon, this could also put a limit on spammers ability to rip off customers or traffic in stolen credit information.
nmap for open LPR ports. I'm sure there are some out there.
Of course the story does have merit if "India" eq "Bad", and if that's the racist slant the Slashdot is pushing on its front page then the editors should reconsider.
Why is being opposed to shipping jobs off to India automatically the equivilent of being racist? That's really an unfair way to attempt to color the debate about where this work should be done and by whom.
In fact it can be argued that shipping jobs overseas is *more* racist than keeping them here. By increasing the demand for IT work in the US, you draw more workers to the field, either from the pool of the unemployed or from other fields. Since more are likely to be drawn from other fields, you actually create openings for jobs, and these new openings could actually be filled by minorities and others who have a longer history of underemployment.
By shipping formerly high-paying jobs to India, you increase pressure on "good" jobs here in the US and decrease the opportunity for minorities here in the US.
I was actually hopeful in the late 90s that perhaps we were at the point where employment demand would reach a point where we could get the unemployment levels down for minorities to levels consistant with whites now. I guess not, I guess we care more about Indians than Americans of all colors.
I think you're right, and I also think that revolutionaries are willing to sacrifice monopoly exclusionary behavior in the name of adoption or openness, which seems to be critical at getting new technology going. You can introduce a new monopoly technology, but you need a monopoly to introduce it into (eg, Win2k for Win98).
I'd love $20M over 10 years. I'd quit, too, and go do something more personally rewarding.
But some people are the Hayes and can't imagine what they'd do if they weren't doing what they're doing.
Not me, $20M and out sounds good to me.
Of course, in general, pharmacists add value to the system -- they advise and help people avoid dangerous drug interactions and such.
When have you EVER gotten any meaningful advice from a pharmacist on anything? Let's assume, that unlike almost every pharmacy I've ever been in, the pharmacist isn't backed up with 100 orders and on the phone constantly.
When I've tried to talk to them, I get two generic answers: "Your doctor will have to answer those questions" and "The PDR doesn't describe any specific drug interactions or side effects".
And not to blame pharmacists, since (A) they don't want to give medical advice, since they're not medical doctors, and (B) they only want to give out "solid", "factual" information.
But, AFAIC, they're just licensed pill counters, they're not really much of a source of information or advice. They have a nicely enforced monopoly on their services, too, which guarantees them work and (education, licensing) helps keep the pool of potential workers small and the paychecks big.
"When I was a kid"(TM) in the early 1970s, there was much less advertising on television and watching television wasn't as obnoxious as it was. Even network-broadcast movies only had a 2-3 commercial breaks per hour, with long stretches of movie in between.
There's a lot more advertising on TV, and a lot more obnoxious advertising gimmicks. I can't help but think that if TV advertising was the same way it was in the 1960s and early 1970s, the idea of paying for a DVR wouldn't be as appealing as the advertising wasn't as obnoxious, it was more of a fair bargain.
But then there's some questions about content, too -- broadcast television used to make some weighty programming. Now it sucks, and if you want anything interesting, you need to have HBO or Showtime for drama, and Tivo and 400 other channels for anything else.
NAFTA only applies when corporations want to move jobs to Mexico for cheap labor. It doesn't apply when it gets in the way of corporate profit guarantees.
Ok, so Americanshave a constitionally guaranteed right to bear arms in their own country, and this is a good thing, but no way can Johnny Foreigner be allowed that same right in his own country?
Not during a state of active combat. The rules of orderly civil society don't apply during a time of war. Even in the US they didn't apply, despite the fact that the US did not host an active field of battle.
If the Chinese market makes enough money for selling there to be profitable, then you can be sure that the overall margins are being propped up by extremely high margin sales in richer countries.
Isn't this also the same rationale used for region coding with DVDs? They're sold in high piracy markets for much lower prices, which are still profitable for their makers, and the region coding protects their high margin markets from imports.
And the same is true for drugs and a host of other things sold overseas. Have the US/Japan/Europe make the real profit and subsidize low-margin (but not unprofitable) Third World markets. Use legislation to enforce this model. Profit!!
I'm sure "real" race fans would never go for this, but NASCAR has gotten lamer and lamer as the number of safety restrictions have gone up; the only "real" racing is on short tracks anymore, and those are rapidly in decline as NASCAR moves races out of the hills into big, fast, new superspeedway style tracks.
The cars are so hobbled by aerodynamics rules and sometimes even restrictor plates that you don't get racing, you get single-file drafting and a ton of pit strategy, and neither is exciting racing. Competitive pits can be exciting, but pit strategy isn't per se, and neither is a long line of cars going round in circles.
Having the drivers race their cars via advanced simulators would eliminate the need for many of the safety enhancements; the owners would drive crash prevention via economics, not "concern for drivers" since no drivers would ever get hurt. Drivers could drive much more aggressively and the cars could be given much more competitive power bands.
It's not "real" racing, but from a distance does it matter if there's a person in the car or not?
How do you explain to a robot the difference between an enemy and a civilian........ In the middle east a shepard has a beard, a turban and a kalashnikov. Enemy troops has a beard, a turban and a kalashnikov.
You call anyone with a Kalishnikov an enemy and kill them all. Don't want to get killed? Leave your AK in your hut, bury it under a rock, but if you carry it, expect to get engaged as a combatant. Combatants carry weapons, non-combatants don't.
Allowing non-combatants to carry arms only creates the situations where troops kill civilians.
I do certianly notice a difference between a DVD at 720p on the TV versus watching the same movie via high def at 1080i via HBO's HD channel or any of the local channels that broadcast movies in HD.
What are you talking about? DVDs are all 720x480 resolution. Even on the best player, they're all 480p at best. Your set may upconvert it to 720p if it does that, but just scaling it doesn't make it 720p.
And a real 720p is preferred by many to 1080i, since it lacks 1080's interlacing. AFAICT most anything with a glass tube is doing 1080i and anything LCD or Plasma is doing 720p, including the Samsung DLPs, and in the case of the LCDs, Plasmas and DLPs, 720p is their maximum resolution.
You're new here, aren't you? Management is cheap, not lazy. Redundancy means that when something breaks they save money by not fixing it, not that they can keep running while they do fix it.
They delays in repair may also be due to the bids they have out to fix it: A Greek sponge diver, the "Polynesian" pearl diver from an unnamed Florida amusement park and a crew from Bangalore with no diving experience or equipment, but a willingness to follow the diving script. There's also a chance that an unnamed "muff diver" may be employed as well, but executives are downplaying it as part of their don't ask, don't tell policy.
Management originally wanted the crew from "Ghost Ship" because the chick was hot, but when they found out it was only a movie they had to look elsewhere.
But do you need more than this bootstrapping capability, which could be easily provided by a OS image? Mounting remote disks involves at least NFS and SMB shares, and you need a basic root filesystem as well. This looks very OS-dependant. More importantly, it's error prone. We can expect bug reports on bugtrag soon...
There is a fine line between too much OS in the firmware and not enough. However, I think it'd be highly valuable to be able to use something like dd to copy a disk's image over the network to either re-image a local HDD or to try to rescue a failed one.
Given the modularity of a unix-like CLI environment, 10MB of firmware would easily be adequate for a healthy "rescue/install" image. Given what's going on in name brand servers (like HPaq's Remote Insight II boards), perhaps a management card is a better place for these things as it can integrate other management functions, but those cards right now can't do stuff like access the disk systems.
As usual, one man's "not enough" is another man's "too much", but that's where modularity may be the ticket -- you don't HAVE to have it, but as long as there's enough open modularity, you can have it if you want.
It's been so long since I've bought a new computer (going on 4 years now), do any BIOS support boot from USB or Firewire yet? I'm not sure an OS would support it, but it'd be worthwhile, and I'm kind of thinking my next machine will be all Firewire or USB2, and this would make it a reality.
There's already rudimentary IP support in many NICs that can boot off the network. It's mostly a DHCP client that grabs a more defined boot image, but there's a lot of good reasons for wanting a better environment in firmware on PCs, including NICs -- how about being able to mount disks, or dd images across a network without ANY OS, and without a DHCP server or other helper to deliver a boot image?
I don't think it'd ever be a total operating environment, and the BIOS code is shelved by the time the machine actually loads a real operating system, so run-time paranoia is probably pretty limited.
Personally, I'd like to see the whole system open and modular, so that the hardware setup and diagnostics portion of the BIOS stayed more or less like it is, and have the firmware environment replacable with BSD/Linux microsystems, Windows microsystems or other flash-resident environments that can be used for diagnostics, setup, recovery, etc.
Some newer office spaces geared towards very small businesses (5-10 people) often have "built-in" networking and phone services. You get your own LAN, internet access, and phone service for some add-on price to your monthly rent.
The problem with this model is that really requires that the building's office layout be fairly static. Many US office buildings, especially the larger ones, are huge empty spaces, made up mainly of cubicles, and even the "real" offices are made of modular partition panels. Since the layout is modular, the network generally can't come with the building.
And even if the old tenant had wiring roughly where you wanted it to be (give or take an extra long drop cable), the cabling is often not up to any standard, poorly labeled, badly done, etc etc.
A lot of building managers *are* hard-assed when it comes to riser space. Our Cal office must use just one riser tech, which is a nightmare when you're trying to schedule telco, a system vendor, and the offical riser techs in one day. Getting one to show up on time is a miracle, three?
You won't be owning a DVD drive for a while, then. The competition is still going strong. I'm somewhat skeptical that -R/RW will vanquish +R/RW, mainly due to the overwhelming market penetration of the +R/+RW consortium (Philips, Dell, HP).
On the other hand, -R seems to be the media format of choice for people in the content industry, and -Rs backers are no slouches, either (Panasonic, Toshiba, Pioneer, and sometimes Sony, whose set-top DVD recorder supports -R/RW and +RW but not +R).
I'm only speculating, but is it that hard to imagine? GM wants profits, not end-user privacy. The FBI wants spying power, not bureaucratic financial efficiency.
I wonder if the Feds will mandate that future versions of this system have the capability to spy on the customer and still work as provided?
The deal's already been made. The FBI agrees to buy a new fleet of Suburbans and in exchange they get OnSpy redesigned to allow for snooping and concurrent emergency functionality.