I picked up my first (Basic) programming book in 1978 at Radio Shack and wrote my first program IN THE STORE on a Model 1 (much to the amazement of the sales staff) at age 12 (ok, that dates me too.) The interest was very strong, and I was regularly experimenting with electronic circuits and learning assembly language programming by age 15. In college, I was one of the few that could be regularly found in the Vax lab at midnight.
I am continually AMAZED at how POORLY (in general) educated kids are in computers when the graduate college with a CS degree. Seems like all they have at that point is a basic ability to think, but they don't (again in general) know jack shit about computers, or have the team-work skills either. Yes there are exceptions - typically I have found them to be the type who has had strong interest in HOW things work their entire life, and have been self-teaching well beyond standard course material. The exceptions that only found interest in college seem to be MUCH more rare.
Just how rare are they? Well, typically I get about 300 - 500 applicants for a position, and usually only ONE is *really* good - it's rare to have more. Frequently we don't even find that one, but end up hiring someone anyway. It's been that way for the past 10 years at least.
IMHO, high schools SHOULD offer some type of internals / programming / networking instruction. Hell, they have wood and auto shop, music and art, why not computers? Why should one of the most important tools (computing) for the future of business / industry be left out?
This is an honest question: why do kids need laptops? Is there some fundamental problem in teaching today that can only be solved with computers?
It's a tool, like a pencil and paper / books are tools. Do they NEED them, like they need water and air? No, but with them they will have the ability to explore and learn outside the classroom environment, and use them to facilitate / enhance education inside the classroom environment.
Keep in mind that the target for these machines is countries with poor formal education, and that the laptops are designed to augment what little education there is. Read up on the OLPC program for more info (no sense in repeating it here) and how the kids actually USE the systems.
Many of these concepts apply to the US as well, but in a little different way. Can anyone deny that the future of American industry is going to require more and more computer skills? Hell, can anyone deny that LIFE in the US is going to require more computing skills?
Outside of niche industries / products, manufacturing is all but dead, and the remainder is highly computer automated. Yes, there are still lots and lots of unskilled and semi-skilled labor jobs, but when you look at the economy as a whole, computer / technology skills will be needed by the vast majority. Remember - it's not just California competing with Alabama, the entire country is competing with the world.
Without computer skills, people are also going to find it increasingly difficult to interface with government, stay informed about things going on in the world around them, do banking / investment, etc. etc.
So maybe the question should be, Why *wouldn't* kids need computers / laptops? How are we going to prepare them to live in a future that we can hardly imagine without them? Our grandparents (or parents for the older crowd) saw tremendous advances in technology via robotics, materials sciences (plastics / ceramics) aerospace, transportation, etc. that give us fresh food from around the world available in every supermarket, instant communication everywhere via satellite / fiber cables / cell technology, the ability to travel anywhere in the world within 24 hours, not to mention medical technology, and so so much more. The advances in human knowledge over the last 80 years is more than the entire rest of human history combined. Anyone see that screeching to a halt?
read up on the 'dont taser me, bro!' news story if you doubt the police state we now live in.
Oh please, that kid was a dick who was asking to get tasered by his behavior and actions. It only seems outrageous when you look at it on the surface. When you look into the background / detailed information, he had it coming. Hell, if I was there, I would have volunteered to taser the a-hole myself! That's not saying that the police handled the situation well (the entire incident was handled poorly IMHO,) but this is NOT a case of "police state" behavior. In fact, the there is a fair amount of evidence indicating that he PLANNED for that confrontation as a stunt.
The CC case is COMPLETELY different and has no similarities to the taser case AT ALL.
"Usable" can mean different things to different people. Your meaning seems to be "secure via network". Others may choose the ability to work with enterprise networks (such as logging in to a domain), reasonable multi-tasking, stability, etc.
Win98 is hardly an "enterprise / corporate desktop" OS in any way, shape, or form. There is no local security AT ALL. At least it's a LITTLE harder to access an NT based (NT, 2K, XP, etc.) box locally without a valid userid and PW. It can be made quite a bit harder on modern systems with proper BIOS settings / BIOS security (not impossible by any means however.) USB support is also a big win for newer systems (and better file systems, etc.)
98 may be fine for you, but it doesn't live up to my definition of usable at all.
If you have more than about 50 people in your company, it's pretty easy to have an Open / Select license and buy your machines with no OS. It's much harder for smaller companies however (as all the machines available to you come pre-loaded - usually with Vista now.)
Of course some newer hardware is now coming out that does not HAVE drivers for anything other than XP, but that's another issue altogether.
I'd really like to see MS forbidden from agreements that require bundling a LICENSE with OEM machines. I don't mind if they ship pre-loaded with an unactivated copy that you can LATER purchase a key and activate, or OPTIONALLY buy a key for it that ships at the same time, but they (and system OEM's) should be forbidden requiring you to purchase a license for windows just to buy the hardware. This would be a huge win for volume license customers who don't NEED the OEM copy, but end up paying for it anyway. It would also help restore competition to the OS market which is effectively nil at the moment.
Openssh is BSD licensed, so there are no GPL concerns. They may be lying about the "clean-room implementation," but in the end it doesn't matter due to the fact that it is BSD licensed.
You completely miss the point that they are running OS X "natively."
People don't (usually) buy a macbook to run Windows or Linux. They buy it to run Mac OS X. They may ALSO run Windows / Linux via VMWare / etc. in order to ease transition or "fit in" to an existing Windows environment, or run a few Windows apps, but they made the conscious choice to buy a Mac running OS X and NOT a Windows box. From this we can infer that the "primary" usage of that machine will be OS X. That is the important fact here when we are talking about Apple eating into the WinTel market. It means that the Mac, with OS X, is becoming a viable and preferred choice for a growing number of people.
I'll grant the GP's point that some people buy a macbook to run Windows / Linux, but that number is going to be very very small.
That is completely wrong. There is ALWAYS a root account. Many (most) system services run as root. Ubuntu has the root password set to the "disabled" value by default however.
You seem to have missed the entire point of what I was saying in any case.
Sudo access and local priv-escalation bugs are two very different things. IMHO, he's probably referring to the fact that so many end-users use the same password EVERYWHERE, like untrusted web sites. Having the sudo password to get to root via the same password you use to login everywhere isn't so great from a security standpoint.
Sudo is great for letting non-root users do some root things in a very controlled way when you DON'T want to give full root access. It's not "really" meant to be a substitute for "su". Using plain "su" or "su -" with a totally different password when you need full root access is much more secure than allowing full sudo access to everything with your everyday login password.
I thought it was still Gremlins ripping control cables out of the wings during flight... Luckily the inflatable auto-pilot (the kind with the inflation tube in it's lap) will still see you safely down.
His statement is most likely true. As the volume on Usenet exploded, many ISP's found themselves with massively overloaded servers. Rather than add capacity, they shut them down.
Yes, because anyone running Linux is going to be THRILLED with the single mouse button on a macbook. Works so awesome in X. Much better than other laptops that have 2 or 3...
Please. The number of macbooks that are NOT running OS X is not going to be statistically significant.
Certificates never had anything to do with reputation or authenticating the motives and business practices of the site operators.
Oh, I understand and agree completely, but that is not how they are MARKETED by cert vendors, and worse, the new "green bar" in IE that MS is pushing.
As for the politicking, I think there may be some mechanisms that can be employed to minimize the effects - unfortunately they are difficult to explain (white paper sized discussion.) The concept I outlined in my other post above is a gross simplification. It's also not a new idea I just came up with - there are far better minds than mine out there that have been thinking about this for some time.
Frankly, this is just "USB fiberchannel". Why not USE fiberchannel??? Surely in mass "consumer" production we can get the chipset / transceiver / cable cost down... It would be nice to come up with better connector technology that protects the optics better however, but LC isn't THAT bad, and can be had for around $16 for a 3M long cable.
This could be solved by a reputation based system. "just having a domain" currently means that you can get a certificate. The fact is that more expensive certificates ("higher level of trust in the marketing lit") means NOTHING to a browser. Either your cert is trusted (signed by a trusted CA), or it's not. Black and white. So yes, I agree with you that the existing cert system is broken.
With a reputation based whitelist of digital signatures, you could trust or not trust applications / scripts signed by individual developers based on their reputation in the community. Signatures (developers) would earn a "trust level".
Abusing the reputation system (such as "I vote to trust Bill, but in reality Bill is an evil developer creating malware") could cost you your OWN reputation and affect how your "vote" affects reputation levels.
The open source community already has a system like this to a certain degree - mutual PGP key signing which allows you to determine the level of trust that a person is who he claims to be.
Maybe a "NoScript Plus", like adblock plus, where a few trusted individuals (or a reputation based system) can be used to maintain an "auto-whitelist" for noscript. Users could then choose the level of "auto" whitelisting they wish to use... None (which is like it is now), Trusted Major Commercial (allowing google, yahoo, etc.), etc. I personally would choose None, but I can see that non-technical users would opt for someone else to maintain the a list (that they could still override locally.)
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I picked up my first (Basic) programming book in 1978 at Radio Shack and wrote my first program IN THE STORE on a Model 1 (much to the amazement of the sales staff) at age 12 (ok, that dates me too.) The interest was very strong, and I was regularly experimenting with electronic circuits and learning assembly language programming by age 15. In college, I was one of the few that could be regularly found in the Vax lab at midnight.
I am continually AMAZED at how POORLY (in general) educated kids are in computers when the graduate college with a CS degree. Seems like all they have at that point is a basic ability to think, but they don't (again in general) know jack shit about computers, or have the team-work skills either. Yes there are exceptions - typically I have found them to be the type who has had strong interest in HOW things work their entire life, and have been self-teaching well beyond standard course material. The exceptions that only found interest in college seem to be MUCH more rare.
Just how rare are they? Well, typically I get about 300 - 500 applicants for a position, and usually only ONE is *really* good - it's rare to have more. Frequently we don't even find that one, but end up hiring someone anyway. It's been that way for the past 10 years at least.
IMHO, high schools SHOULD offer some type of internals / programming / networking instruction. Hell, they have wood and auto shop, music and art, why not computers? Why should one of the most important tools (computing) for the future of business / industry be left out?
This is an honest question: why do kids need laptops? Is there some fundamental problem in teaching today that can only be solved with computers?
It's a tool, like a pencil and paper / books are tools. Do they NEED them, like they need water and air? No, but with them they will have the ability to explore and learn outside the classroom environment, and use them to facilitate / enhance education inside the classroom environment.
Keep in mind that the target for these machines is countries with poor formal education, and that the laptops are designed to augment what little education there is. Read up on the OLPC program for more info (no sense in repeating it here) and how the kids actually USE the systems.
Many of these concepts apply to the US as well, but in a little different way. Can anyone deny that the future of American industry is going to require more and more computer skills? Hell, can anyone deny that LIFE in the US is going to require more computing skills?
Outside of niche industries / products, manufacturing is all but dead, and the remainder is highly computer automated. Yes, there are still lots and lots of unskilled and semi-skilled labor jobs, but when you look at the economy as a whole, computer / technology skills will be needed by the vast majority. Remember - it's not just California competing with Alabama, the entire country is competing with the world.
Without computer skills, people are also going to find it increasingly difficult to interface with government, stay informed about things going on in the world around them, do banking / investment, etc. etc.
So maybe the question should be, Why *wouldn't* kids need computers / laptops? How are we going to prepare them to live in a future that we can hardly imagine without them? Our grandparents (or parents for the older crowd) saw tremendous advances in technology via robotics, materials sciences (plastics / ceramics) aerospace, transportation, etc. that give us fresh food from around the world available in every supermarket, instant communication everywhere via satellite / fiber cables / cell technology, the ability to travel anywhere in the world within 24 hours, not to mention medical technology, and so so much more. The advances in human knowledge over the last 80 years is more than the entire rest of human history combined. Anyone see that screeching to a halt?
Despite your first comment, you really do miss the point.
You are not buying a $399 laptop. You are buying a $188 laptop and donating $211 to a charitable cause.
Of course every other phone has a user-replaceable battery, so it's really a non-issue. So add to the iPhone list:
* swappable battery
And then:
* a REAL SDK that allows native 3rd party applications
* slide-out keyboard
* CDMA / VCAST version / allow other carriers
Actually, Nail Clippers are fine.
See the List of Permitted / Prohibited Items.
read up on the 'dont taser me, bro!' news story if you doubt the police state we now live in.
Oh please, that kid was a dick who was asking to get tasered by his behavior and actions. It only seems outrageous when you look at it on the surface. When you look into the background / detailed information, he had it coming. Hell, if I was there, I would have volunteered to taser the a-hole myself! That's not saying that the police handled the situation well (the entire incident was handled poorly IMHO,) but this is NOT a case of "police state" behavior. In fact, the there is a fair amount of evidence indicating that he PLANNED for that confrontation as a stunt.
The CC case is COMPLETELY different and has no similarities to the taser case AT ALL.
"Usable" can mean different things to different people. Your meaning seems to be "secure via network".
Others may choose the ability to work with enterprise networks (such as logging in to a domain), reasonable multi-tasking, stability, etc.
Win98 is hardly an "enterprise / corporate desktop" OS in any way, shape, or form. There is no local security AT ALL. At least it's a LITTLE harder to access an NT based (NT, 2K, XP, etc.) box locally without a valid userid and PW. It can be made quite a bit harder on modern systems with proper BIOS settings / BIOS security (not impossible by any means however.) USB support is also a big win for newer systems (and better file systems, etc.)
98 may be fine for you, but it doesn't live up to my definition of usable at all.
If you have more than about 50 people in your company, it's pretty easy to have an Open / Select license and buy your machines with no OS. It's much harder for smaller companies however (as all the machines available to you come pre-loaded - usually with Vista now.)
Of course some newer hardware is now coming out that does not HAVE drivers for anything other than XP, but that's another issue altogether.
I'd really like to see MS forbidden from agreements that require bundling a LICENSE with OEM machines. I don't mind if they ship pre-loaded with an unactivated copy that you can LATER purchase a key and activate, or OPTIONALLY buy a key for it that ships at the same time, but they (and system OEM's) should be forbidden requiring you to purchase a license for windows just to buy the hardware. This would be a huge win for volume license customers who don't NEED the OEM copy, but end up paying for it anyway. It would also help restore competition to the OS market which is effectively nil at the moment.
In fact, Red Hat makes most of its money off of Enterprise Linux licenses while still being able to give away the source allowing Centos to exist.
Openssh is BSD licensed, so there are no GPL concerns. They may be lying about the "clean-room implementation," but in the end it doesn't matter due to the fact that it is BSD licensed.
You completely miss the point that they are running OS X "natively."
People don't (usually) buy a macbook to run Windows or Linux. They buy it to run Mac OS X. They may ALSO run Windows / Linux via VMWare / etc. in order to ease transition or "fit in" to an existing Windows environment, or run a few Windows apps, but they made the conscious choice to buy a Mac running OS X and NOT a Windows box. From this we can infer that the "primary" usage of that machine will be OS X. That is the important fact here when we are talking about Apple eating into the WinTel market. It means that the Mac, with OS X, is becoming a viable and preferred choice for a growing number of people.
I'll grant the GP's point that some people buy a macbook to run Windows / Linux, but that number is going to be very very small.
theres no root account
That is completely wrong. There is ALWAYS a root account. Many (most) system services run as root. Ubuntu has the root password set to the "disabled" value by default however.
You seem to have missed the entire point of what I was saying in any case.
[Foghorn Leghorn voice] It's a joke son...
The difference is that OS X has achieved the "it just works" holy grail that Ubuntu reaches for (albeit by "cheating" - limiting hardware configs)
Yes, because OS X isn't limited at ALL in the hardware it can run on, right? Please.
Yes, because Vista SOOOO much better as a name. I think it means "Feces" in Tongan, but I'm not perfectly sure of that...
Sudo access and local priv-escalation bugs are two very different things. IMHO, he's probably referring to the fact that so many end-users use the same password EVERYWHERE, like untrusted web sites. Having the sudo password to get to root via the same password you use to login everywhere isn't so great from a security standpoint.
Sudo is great for letting non-root users do some root things in a very controlled way when you DON'T want to give full root access. It's not "really" meant to be a substitute for "su". Using plain "su" or "su -" with a totally different password when you need full root access is much more secure than allowing full sudo access to everything with your everyday login password.
I thought it was still Gremlins ripping control cables out of the wings during flight... Luckily the inflatable auto-pilot (the kind with the inflation tube in it's lap) will still see you safely down.
Argh! can't keep all these movies straight!
His statement is most likely true. As the volume on Usenet exploded, many ISP's found themselves with massively overloaded servers. Rather than add capacity, they shut them down.
Yes, because anyone running Linux is going to be THRILLED with the single mouse button on a macbook. Works so awesome in X. Much better than other laptops that have 2 or 3...
Please. The number of macbooks that are NOT running OS X is not going to be statistically significant.
Certificates never had anything to do with reputation or authenticating the motives and business practices of the site operators.
Oh, I understand and agree completely, but that is not how they are MARKETED by cert vendors, and worse, the new "green bar" in IE that MS is pushing.
As for the politicking, I think there may be some mechanisms that can be employed to minimize the effects - unfortunately they are difficult to explain (white paper sized discussion.) The concept I outlined in my other post above is a gross simplification. It's also not a new idea I just came up with - there are far better minds than mine out there that have been thinking about this for some time.
I can always be called upon to laud WordPerfect.
I still haven't forgiven them for the abortion that was version 6, where the stability went in the toilet.
I'm sure you be able to buy a Belkin or other generic for $20 or so, but Bad Buy will only carry the "Monster" models for $526 and up.
USB attached arrays (like drobo.)
USB Ramdisks.
Frankly, this is just "USB fiberchannel". Why not USE fiberchannel??? Surely in mass "consumer" production we can get the chipset / transceiver / cable cost down... It would be nice to come up with better connector technology that protects the optics better however, but LC isn't THAT bad, and can be had for around $16 for a 3M long cable.
This could be solved by a reputation based system. "just having a domain" currently means that you can get a certificate. The fact is that more expensive certificates ("higher level of trust in the marketing lit") means NOTHING to a browser. Either your cert is trusted (signed by a trusted CA), or it's not. Black and white. So yes, I agree with you that the existing cert system is broken.
With a reputation based whitelist of digital signatures, you could trust or not trust applications / scripts signed by individual developers based on their reputation in the community. Signatures (developers) would earn a "trust level".
Abusing the reputation system (such as "I vote to trust Bill, but in reality Bill is an evil developer creating malware") could cost you your OWN reputation and affect how your "vote" affects reputation levels.
The open source community already has a system like this to a certain degree - mutual PGP key signing which allows you to determine the level of trust that a person is who he claims to be.
Maybe a "NoScript Plus", like adblock plus, where a few trusted individuals (or a reputation based system) can be used to maintain an "auto-whitelist" for noscript. Users could then choose the level of "auto" whitelisting they wish to use... None (which is like it is now), Trusted Major Commercial (allowing google, yahoo, etc.), etc. I personally would choose None, but I can see that non-technical users would opt for someone else to maintain the a list (that they could still override locally.)