You missed the part where the economic theories screwed Science's girlfriend, so Science hit the economic theories over the head with a folding chair, but then Slashdot ran into the ring and broke everything up. Then Science challenged the theories to settle it once and for all, in the cage at this weekend's Pay Per View event. Agreement, my ass! This is serious conflict.
being in favor of a well-regulated militia's right to bear arms
being in favor of keeping weapons away from people who will use them to commit crime
Everyone will say they're in favor of science, just as everyone says they hold all the above positions simultaneously.
A pro-science party would solve nothing if people don't know what science is. Its members could still claim to be in favor of science while also working to undermine it. That's where the whole "Intelligent Design" idea, spoken of as though it were a theory, came from.
The rule says "Don't mix the vendor networking gear."
Did they say why? That kind of strikes me as odd to the point of ridiculous too, but if they at least explain it, maybe it would get a little less weird.
No, I don't really think it would get less weird, but.. WTF! WHY?
Go after the manufacturers. Just make it so that if someone sells someone else a computer without the new owner getting all the keys, let that be prosecutable as fraud or some variant of all the crazy anti-hacking laws.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's such a shocking and overtly demonstration of dealing in bad faith, that it's probably already illegal in most countries if we look at the books hard enough. For that reason alone, I think we almost ought to thanking Microsoft for finally pressing the issue hard enough that we finally really have to deal with this festering cancer that the industry has been dripping onto everyone.
If Dell sells you an x86 box (or Apple sells you a tiny ARM box, or Sony sells you a Cell box) and doesn't include the master keys or doesn't let you manage what signed code is authorized and what isn't, that's
A security issue, both in terms of
denial of service
granting authorization for third parties to control your machine
Anti-competitive (the "exclusive dealing" mentioned in TFA)
User-hostile. This harms everyone except whoever pays to be helped by it.
This has nothing to do with Microsoft specifically, except as an expansion of the whole XBox bullshit. (And by all means, burn Microsoft to an unrecognizable cinder for that.) Code-signing isn't evil; code-signing in defiance of the owner for purposes of limiting what a computer's owner is allowed to make a computer do, is what's evil. Go after the inexcusably deliberately crippled firmware (i.e. malware) which doesn't put the right party in charge of key management, not Windows. (There are so many reasons to hate Windows, but this is not one of them.)
As for the problems/inconveniences grub2 has with distributing and installing signed binaries, even when the user (the party GPL3 tries to protect) has ultimate authority, I'm sorry but that's a GPL3 problem. It can be handled, so don't panic over that. At worst we all go back to GPL2ed grub1, boo hoo. That one thing is no reason to kill the idea of code-signing.
Pray tell, who would you solve the problem of displaying any movie from a huge library only a couple of minutes after they select it, using time-shifting?
You don't. Or you don't, unless there's a predictable pattern, like for TV series.
2000 Tivo or 2011 MythTV: "Oh you watch the Daily Show every day? I'll record the next episode when you're asleep or at work or while you're watching something else, so that it'll be ready when you feel like watching it."
2011 streaming: "Uhhhh.. he watched the Daily Show yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, but there's no telling what he's going to wa-- oh hi! What? You want to watch the Daily Show? O[pause]k, I'll ge[pause]t right[pause] on th[pause]at! Hmm.. you might want to hit pause button and wait a few minutes before you hit play. We'll make this work, I promise."
(Ok, so that's an exaggeration. I'm dramatizing to draw attention to the technical problems. Of course, the real 2011 streaming experience (for nontechnical reasons) is "Sorry, we don't have the video that you want to watch.")
2011 bittorrent: "You want to watch an eyecandy movie? No problem! Oh, it takes more than 2 hours to download 2 hours worth of decent quality video without distracting blockiness or other noise artifacts on your huge TV? That's ok, we'll get it however fast we can, so that you don't suffer when you watch it."
Broadcast and timeshifting shove the technical limitations onto the user instead of solving them.
So does streaming's reliability problems, ****pathetically*** low bitrate/quality, and higher costs. Assuming bandwidth keeps going up and demand doesn't, I can see how it'll be viable roughly decade from now (maybe 2020 is the year streaming beats 1920 tech), but I can't imagine how anyone with what I have in 2011 (7 Mbps ADSL) can possibly stand it. I'll check it out again about when I have 100 Mbps and the ISPs' own upstream links have similarly increased. It might have crossed the "good enough" threshold by then.
I can see some minor advantages to not having to think about what you want to watch before you watch it. "I want to watch Movie X right now this very second and cannot wait until tomorrow even though 60 seconds ago I had never heard of Movie X" does come up but it's pretty rare. (Actually, I am lying through my teeth and the "cannot wait until tomorrow" never does come up, but I can at least imagine it realistically.) But the advantage of that really is minor, and especially so, when it costs everything else.
And radio pioneered the solution to the Netflix inefficiency problem: broadcast. Before 1920, Netflix sucked as much as it does today, but then they fixed the upstream inefficiency problem.
And many people accepted that, though it did have one downside which took about 56 years to really deal with. VHS pioneered the solution to not everyone wanting to watch the same broadcast at the same time: time-shifting. So while people were flaming Netflix in 1975 nearly as much as they had been in 1919, things suddenly settled down and Netflix got good again.
Then in the early 21st century, Netflix pioneered a return to all of 1919's problems. What's fascinating, is that they've managed to build an image of coolness and modernity, instead of as luddites or evolutionary throwbacks.
It seriously bugs me when people confuse the DOM/JS API for a given platform and the language itself. One is not intrinsically tied to the other.
Yeah, and printf() isn't technically part of C.
I don't think most programmers learn languages separately from their "standard" libraries. They have a project they need to do, so they're learning the library that they're going to use; they don't learn languages in academic isolation where the language all by itself is all they see. As much as javascript is a language in its own, it originated in the web browser and that's where people use it and why people use it.
If you extract javascript from that environment (and yes, I know some people have) it's just another language, with nothing special or particularly nice about it, even if it is capable.
Yeah, I know them's fightin' words. I read this part..
JS has been a favorite language of mine for a very long time
..and I don't mean to spit on your baby, but it really looks to me just like any other baby, except for the cute ones, which your baby ain't.;-)
The problem is that private space flight isn't profitable
Does it really need to be?
Private doesn't have to mean business; it just means funded by any means other than taxation and Congressional consensus.
Whatever happened to doing things because you want to? People do things not-for-profit all the time. Spread your religion and kill some infidels. Get laid. Write a free Unix-like kernel. Have a beer. Make a yet another cliche zombie movie. Volunteer at the soup kitchen. Play a video game. Become a scientist. Seed a torrent. Teach your dog a new trick. Post on Slashdot. Build a rocket. About the only thing these things have in common, is that you might want to do them even if it doesn't get you money.
I'm hearing lots of people give some pretty credible reasons (some emotional, some rational) for why they want to build more rockets regardless of it not making money. Those people need to think of themselves as being the "we" in "we should build more rockets." "We" doesn't have to be "everyone." In fact, it almost never is.
What do you think would happen if we pitted a modern equivalent of the P-51 against the F-22? Take a cheap-and-quick-to-build airframe, put 10,000 of them in the air, and keep the replacements coming. What would the outcome be?
Sorry, I can't give a citation, but I remember something about someone (DoD?) doing studies similar to that back in the early 1980s, except it was about the expensive aircraft of the time, $40M F-14s, verses multiple cheap eastern block aircraft costing just a few million apiece. The Soviet break-even point was about three of their cheap fighters (not Mig 29s, but some earlier model, don't remember what), so that about $10M worth of their equipment was a roughly even match for $40M of ours. Oops.
(By coincidence, this has become my modern view of hard drives. Don't bother paying extra for supposedly-reliable ones; buy cheap shit and RAID it.)
I love the "translation" posts because I hate them all individually -- none of them stress my way of looking at the problem. Here's my translation:
Microsoft supports OEMs having the flexibility to decide who manages security certificates, because they are our customers, not the users. Fuck the users, why should they have any decision making power in what their computers are allowed to do? We didn't get to be the marketshare leader by leaving decisions to users. Those aren't the people who sign per-processor licensing deals in the millions.
Confiscating a rack actually requires effort, manpower, expense. If a few guys have to go over to the data center, there is a reasonable chance that at least somebody might stop and check to see that what they're doing makes sense. ("Hey guys, this piece of paper says whitehouse.com; I'm not sure we should be pulling the plug on this computer that has a posit note on it, saying whitehouse.gov.") There will be witnesses at the data center. There will be more documentation. There won't be due process as we normally think of it, but at least there's a process of some sort, and our bizarre seizure laws are something that the public at least has the theoretical ability to lobby for change.
Subverting DNS requires a button click, can be done accidentally, and can be done by anyone who finds flaws in the authentication system. Some day your.com domain may go offline via the government's censorship mechanism, simply because some script kiddie wanted to show off that he could do it, not because you embarrassed the government.
Requiring physical action improves security. It filters out less-committed adversaries (and there's a countless horde of those out there on the internet) and creates more opportunities to detect errors.
Secure boot isn't necessarily a dumb idea and would be harmless, if done sensibly. The firmware just needs to present a UI where the owner can manage (add and delete) all the public keys used to check signatures for what the machine's owner authorizes it to run. If you buy a computer and then you are the arbiter of your computer does, then at worst that's an added capability that you don't elect to use, and at best it's useful.
But yeah, I doubt any manufacturers are installing firmware that does it right. If any are, they need to speak up so that people will know their hardware is safe to buy.
While I'm a little less doom'n'gloom on this story, let's explore "implement good security" a little bit here.
If I say "give me your wallet" and you say "no" and draw a gun, the gun increases your security and decreases my security. Security is subjective: it's always about who. I think most people view the goal of computer security as having the computer serve the interests of the owner, over the interests of attackers (e.g. spammers or spies). Taking power away from the owner (withholding the signing keys) and putting that into the hands of the manufacturer, isn't merely "security" -- it's someone's security, and that "someone" isn't you.
You say you "have to use Windows" and I will (perhaps incorrectly) leap to the conclusion that your employer made that choice. So why shouldn't your employer be the keeper of the keys, rather than the manufacturer?
"Secure Boot" isn't a dumb idea in isolation, but it becomes a dumb idea and a security downgrade, if the computers don't come with the keys. People have reason to be concerned that some manufacturers are going to screw this up, perhaps even on purpose. And while screwing it up on purpose seems absurd, that is happening in real life right now, with smaller computers.
Now, where can I buy a system to do this that isn't wrapped up in some proprietary software mechanism? The only large-scale archival systems you can get..
How large is large-scale? If it's large-scale by the standards of 20 years ago, then Samsung and Western Digital make something a few orders of magnitude larger than what you need, for under $100 though you'll want to buy at least two of them plus a backup system.
If it's large scale by today's standards too (i.e. it doesn't all fit twice inside an ATX tower case; it's fantasy-scale by the standards of 20 years ago) then you have serious problems that I probably can't really help you with, but I'll try. I assume you have an absolutely enormous budget. I'd say buy the proprietary system for today, use it for five years, and then migrate the data to a sub-$100 consumer part and throw the proprietary system away. Sounds awful but that's the cost of being on the bleeding edge with your disgusting volume requirements.;-)
What have we got for (large amounts of) digital data?
Stop asking about media longevity and ask about file longevity. Then the answer becomes: store it on the media-of-the-day, whatever that is (today that's either hard disk or SSD, depending on taste/volume/speed_rquirements) on a networked computer. You don't think anymore in terms of reading from media, you think it terms of sending an NFS (or HTTP or whatever) request.
The web was what made the Metaverse age so rapidly. Take a MUD-like centralized world, which people were already familiar with, add on some graphics and you've got something that seems reasonably cool in 1993. But the web guys had already come up with a more promising foundation and were about to hit the mainstream over the head with it. Within a few years, the Metaverse's underpinnings seemed old-fashioned, but you could fix the problem (loosely in your imagination, at least) by stressing the "Protocol" in "Global Multimedia Protocol Group" and re-imagining it as distributed, not just a bunch of clients talking to The One Great Server.
If Stephenson really thinks (dude, really?!) WoW is the future of cyberspace, then he's rejecting distributed VR, and settling for the graphical MUD. And I have to say "settling" because the first thing that leaps to my mind about WoW is that it's a world where everyone is Blizzard's bitch. The idea is so boring from the get-go (in a technological futurist sense; I'm not criticizing the game itself or saying it's not fun, because I haven't played it (but I saw the South Park episode, does that count?)) that I would think Science Fiction people would all want to distance themselves from it (unless they wanted to use it as a kind of dystopian example of failed dreams).
Having there just be one Metaverse (as Snow Crash seems to imply) is totally unrealistic, because there will (obviously?!) be so many different visions and agendas for what a metaverse should be. (And even if you limit the discussion to commercial exploitation, that includes deeply incompatible agendas, such as "my profit" vs "your profit.") Not that some won't be very popular, but there will never be one-size-fits-all. It's just human nature that no matter what you have, even if it gets a large userbase, there must be people who say, "This MUD is lame" or "This cabal is comprised of lamers" followed by "I'm going to make my own which fixes some problems."
If you don't hate the MCP then you're anti-freedom, and if you don't miss the MCP after Tron kills him then you're anti-order, anti-consistency, whatever.;-) There's no right answer.
Vinge recognizes this with belief circles. Fragmentation happens, and you've got to include that if you want to seem realistic.
On top of the human nature issue, there's also the technical problem. All MMORPGs have a scaling problem to handle, and make tough choices and pay a cost, one way or another, to deal with it. Not only can you not fit everyone into one metaverse, it's also yet another crack for a schism to develop, because different people will want to pay the scaling cost in different ways.
If you look to WoW as the future, I think you're not keeping up. FWIW, though, I don't see Stephenson really implying that in the interview. AFAICT he's just talking about graphics hardware.
I realise it took a long time to do these tests and I realise that sites should be compensated in some way to justify their time and expenses. But 38 pages is taking the piss.
The saddest thing about Phoronix is that even if you pay him it's still 38 ad-laden pages. That is, unless you remember to load the forum page first, before you RTFA. And he has known this for years (that's not an exaggeration), received numerous complaints from his paying customers about it (doesn't have the "I didn't know you people were unhappy" excuse) and still hasn't done anything about it.
And I really mean "sad." That is the best word to describe it. It's a (minor! I'll admit!) tragedy in the original sense of the word. The site is basically a good idea and otherwise handled well (for what it's intended to do), but is dooming itself simply because the central character refuses to see the elephant in the room that everyone else sees.
I don't hate Phoronix and will be sorry to see it go (tables of numbers have their place). And yet I'm probably not going to renew my support. Maybe its loss will make new room for the same niche, but with someone else handling this basic common-sense in-your-face aspect sensibly.
The issue isn't whether Google is free to do that, or should be free to do that, or whether they are being good or evil. All that is completely irrelevant when you look at things as a user. The issue is what users get.
If you end up with something user-maintainable and user-verified-trustworthy, then it's going to pass the test from RMS' point if view. If you end up with a computer that you can't fix, it's not going to pass RMS' test.
In that respect, Google's recent Android releases, as well as many hardware manufacturers' releases, all fail the test, and it doesn't matter what their motivations are.
Many people don't care. They complete trust Google and the manufacturers without reservation. (And that's fine, IMHO, because if it turns out they're wrong, it's their problem. And if they're right, then end up with a computer which never annoys them.)
OTOH if you have in the past experienced unpleasantness with failure to obtain maintenance (whether that maintenance is good old fashioned bugfixes, or addition of features, or removal of anti-features), resulting in a bitter oath of "never again," then Android 3 and manufacturer-locked phones don't have what it takes. When you want to change something, you don't care why they decided to not let you change it; you just care that you can't do it.
He could write one report that anyone with a Web browser could read anywhere, regardless of their leanings.
I guess having some raw facts is a good start, but before we show this story to others, we need to put in something that explains the crash was an inevitable consequence of
Obamacare
Global warming
The federal debt
The sad state of education in America today
America's loss of faith in the face of mere theories
Software patents and non-producing litigious patent holders
They're trying to take our guns
Illegal immigrants
Multinational corporations corrupting democracy
(and since Gosling should be part of this competition) C# &.Net
(Pick at least one, though if you can blame the crash on several of the above items simultaneously, you get exponentially more points.)
I'm all for MS-flaming but how could anyone possibly be disappointed or shocked by this? It's like expecting 68k Macs to run PPC binaries. You might want it, just like you want a unicorn pony, but you don't say "OMG! NO UNIKORN PONIES? I THOT WE WERE GETTING THEM!!1 Y NOT? EVERYONE ELSE GETS UNIKORN PONIES! ANDROID ARMS HAVE XEON EMULATORS, MIRCO$OFT $UX!!"
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the part where the economic theories screwed Science's girlfriend, so Science hit the economic theories over the head with a folding chair, but then Slashdot ran into the ring and broke everything up. Then Science challenged the theories to settle it once and for all, in the cage at this weekend's Pay Per View event. Agreement, my ass! This is serious conflict.
Being in favor of science would be just like
Everyone will say they're in favor of science, just as everyone says they hold all the above positions simultaneously.
A pro-science party would solve nothing if people don't know what science is. Its members could still claim to be in favor of science while also working to undermine it. That's where the whole "Intelligent Design" idea, spoken of as though it were a theory, came from.
Did they say why? That kind of strikes me as odd to the point of ridiculous too, but if they at least explain it, maybe it would get a little less weird.
No, I don't really think it would get less weird, but .. WTF! WHY?
Go after the manufacturers. Just make it so that if someone sells someone else a computer without the new owner getting all the keys, let that be prosecutable as fraud or some variant of all the crazy anti-hacking laws.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's such a shocking and overtly demonstration of dealing in bad faith, that it's probably already illegal in most countries if we look at the books hard enough. For that reason alone, I think we almost ought to thanking Microsoft for finally pressing the issue hard enough that we finally really have to deal with this festering cancer that the industry has been dripping onto everyone.
If Dell sells you an x86 box (or Apple sells you a tiny ARM box, or Sony sells you a Cell box) and doesn't include the master keys or doesn't let you manage what signed code is authorized and what isn't, that's
This has nothing to do with Microsoft specifically, except as an expansion of the whole XBox bullshit. (And by all means, burn Microsoft to an unrecognizable cinder for that.) Code-signing isn't evil; code-signing in defiance of the owner for purposes of limiting what a computer's owner is allowed to make a computer do, is what's evil. Go after the inexcusably deliberately crippled firmware (i.e. malware) which doesn't put the right party in charge of key management, not Windows. (There are so many reasons to hate Windows, but this is not one of them.)
As for the problems/inconveniences grub2 has with distributing and installing signed binaries, even when the user (the party GPL3 tries to protect) has ultimate authority, I'm sorry but that's a GPL3 problem. It can be handled, so don't panic over that. At worst we all go back to GPL2ed grub1, boo hoo. That one thing is no reason to kill the idea of code-signing.
You don't. Or you don't, unless there's a predictable pattern, like for TV series.
2000 Tivo or 2011 MythTV: "Oh you watch the Daily Show every day? I'll record the next episode when you're asleep or at work or while you're watching something else, so that it'll be ready when you feel like watching it."
2011 streaming: "Uhhhh.. he watched the Daily Show yesterday and the day before that and the day before that, but there's no telling what he's going to wa-- oh hi! What? You want to watch the Daily Show? O[pause]k, I'll ge[pause]t right[pause] on th[pause]at! Hmm.. you might want to hit pause button and wait a few minutes before you hit play. We'll make this work, I promise."
(Ok, so that's an exaggeration. I'm dramatizing to draw attention to the technical problems. Of course, the real 2011 streaming experience (for nontechnical reasons) is "Sorry, we don't have the video that you want to watch.")
2011 bittorrent: "You want to watch an eyecandy movie? No problem! Oh, it takes more than 2 hours to download 2 hours worth of decent quality video without distracting blockiness or other noise artifacts on your huge TV? That's ok, we'll get it however fast we can, so that you don't suffer when you watch it."
So does streaming's reliability problems, ****pathetically*** low bitrate/quality, and higher costs. Assuming bandwidth keeps going up and demand doesn't, I can see how it'll be viable roughly decade from now (maybe 2020 is the year streaming beats 1920 tech), but I can't imagine how anyone with what I have in 2011 (7 Mbps ADSL) can possibly stand it. I'll check it out again about when I have 100 Mbps and the ISPs' own upstream links have similarly increased. It might have crossed the "good enough" threshold by then.
I can see some minor advantages to not having to think about what you want to watch before you watch it. "I want to watch Movie X right now this very second and cannot wait until tomorrow even though 60 seconds ago I had never heard of Movie X" does come up but it's pretty rare. (Actually, I am lying through my teeth and the "cannot wait until tomorrow" never does come up, but I can at least imagine it realistically.) But the advantage of that really is minor, and especially so, when it costs everything else.
And radio pioneered the solution to the Netflix inefficiency problem: broadcast. Before 1920, Netflix sucked as much as it does today, but then they fixed the upstream inefficiency problem.
And many people accepted that, though it did have one downside which took about 56 years to really deal with. VHS pioneered the solution to not everyone wanting to watch the same broadcast at the same time: time-shifting. So while people were flaming Netflix in 1975 nearly as much as they had been in 1919, things suddenly settled down and Netflix got good again.
Then in the early 21st century, Netflix pioneered a return to all of 1919's problems. What's fascinating, is that they've managed to build an image of coolness and modernity, instead of as luddites or evolutionary throwbacks.
Yeah, and printf() isn't technically part of C.
I don't think most programmers learn languages separately from their "standard" libraries. They have a project they need to do, so they're learning the library that they're going to use; they don't learn languages in academic isolation where the language all by itself is all they see. As much as javascript is a language in its own, it originated in the web browser and that's where people use it and why people use it.
If you extract javascript from that environment (and yes, I know some people have) it's just another language, with nothing special or particularly nice about it, even if it is capable.
Yeah, I know them's fightin' words. I read this part..
Does it really need to be?
Private doesn't have to mean business; it just means funded by any means other than taxation and Congressional consensus.
Whatever happened to doing things because you want to? People do things not-for-profit all the time. Spread your religion and kill some infidels. Get laid. Write a free Unix-like kernel. Have a beer. Make a yet another cliche zombie movie. Volunteer at the soup kitchen. Play a video game. Become a scientist. Seed a torrent. Teach your dog a new trick. Post on Slashdot. Build a rocket. About the only thing these things have in common, is that you might want to do them even if it doesn't get you money.
I'm hearing lots of people give some pretty credible reasons (some emotional, some rational) for why they want to build more rockets regardless of it not making money. Those people need to think of themselves as being the "we" in "we should build more rockets." "We" doesn't have to be "everyone." In fact, it almost never is.
Sorry, I can't give a citation, but I remember something about someone (DoD?) doing studies similar to that back in the early 1980s, except it was about the expensive aircraft of the time, $40M F-14s, verses multiple cheap eastern block aircraft costing just a few million apiece. The Soviet break-even point was about three of their cheap fighters (not Mig 29s, but some earlier model, don't remember what), so that about $10M worth of their equipment was a roughly even match for $40M of ours. Oops.
(By coincidence, this has become my modern view of hard drives. Don't bother paying extra for supposedly-reliable ones; buy cheap shit and RAID it.)
I love the "translation" posts because I hate them all individually -- none of them stress my way of looking at the problem. Here's my translation:
And what if the server isn't on US soil?
But let's say it is.
Confiscating a rack actually requires effort, manpower, expense. If a few guys have to go over to the data center, there is a reasonable chance that at least somebody might stop and check to see that what they're doing makes sense. ("Hey guys, this piece of paper says whitehouse.com; I'm not sure we should be pulling the plug on this computer that has a posit note on it, saying whitehouse.gov.") There will be witnesses at the data center. There will be more documentation. There won't be due process as we normally think of it, but at least there's a process of some sort, and our bizarre seizure laws are something that the public at least has the theoretical ability to lobby for change.
Subverting DNS requires a button click, can be done accidentally, and can be done by anyone who finds flaws in the authentication system. Some day your .com domain may go offline via the government's censorship mechanism, simply because some script kiddie wanted to show off that he could do it, not because you embarrassed the government.
Requiring physical action improves security. It filters out less-committed adversaries (and there's a countless horde of those out there on the internet) and creates more opportunities to detect errors.
Secure boot isn't necessarily a dumb idea and would be harmless, if done sensibly. The firmware just needs to present a UI where the owner can manage (add and delete) all the public keys used to check signatures for what the machine's owner authorizes it to run. If you buy a computer and then you are the arbiter of your computer does, then at worst that's an added capability that you don't elect to use, and at best it's useful.
But yeah, I doubt any manufacturers are installing firmware that does it right. If any are, they need to speak up so that people will know their hardware is safe to buy.
That's the problem with handouts. The disadvantaged get all the advantages!
While I'm a little less doom'n'gloom on this story, let's explore "implement good security" a little bit here.
If I say "give me your wallet" and you say "no" and draw a gun, the gun increases your security and decreases my security. Security is subjective: it's always about who. I think most people view the goal of computer security as having the computer serve the interests of the owner, over the interests of attackers (e.g. spammers or spies). Taking power away from the owner (withholding the signing keys) and putting that into the hands of the manufacturer, isn't merely "security" -- it's someone's security, and that "someone" isn't you.
You say you "have to use Windows" and I will (perhaps incorrectly) leap to the conclusion that your employer made that choice. So why shouldn't your employer be the keeper of the keys, rather than the manufacturer?
"Secure Boot" isn't a dumb idea in isolation, but it becomes a dumb idea and a security downgrade, if the computers don't come with the keys. People have reason to be concerned that some manufacturers are going to screw this up, perhaps even on purpose. And while screwing it up on purpose seems absurd, that is happening in real life right now, with smaller computers.
How large is large-scale? If it's large-scale by the standards of 20 years ago, then Samsung and Western Digital make something a few orders of magnitude larger than what you need, for under $100 though you'll want to buy at least two of them plus a backup system.
If it's large scale by today's standards too (i.e. it doesn't all fit twice inside an ATX tower case; it's fantasy-scale by the standards of 20 years ago) then you have serious problems that I probably can't really help you with, but I'll try. I assume you have an absolutely enormous budget. I'd say buy the proprietary system for today, use it for five years, and then migrate the data to a sub-$100 consumer part and throw the proprietary system away. Sounds awful but that's the cost of being on the bleeding edge with your disgusting volume requirements. ;-)
Stop asking about media longevity and ask about file longevity. Then the answer becomes: store it on the media-of-the-day, whatever that is (today that's either hard disk or SSD, depending on taste/volume/speed_rquirements) on a networked computer. You don't think anymore in terms of reading from media, you think it terms of sending an NFS (or HTTP or whatever) request.
The web was what made the Metaverse age so rapidly. Take a MUD-like centralized world, which people were already familiar with, add on some graphics and you've got something that seems reasonably cool in 1993. But the web guys had already come up with a more promising foundation and were about to hit the mainstream over the head with it. Within a few years, the Metaverse's underpinnings seemed old-fashioned, but you could fix the problem (loosely in your imagination, at least) by stressing the "Protocol" in "Global Multimedia Protocol Group" and re-imagining it as distributed, not just a bunch of clients talking to The One Great Server.
If Stephenson really thinks (dude, really?!) WoW is the future of cyberspace, then he's rejecting distributed VR, and settling for the graphical MUD. And I have to say "settling" because the first thing that leaps to my mind about WoW is that it's a world where everyone is Blizzard's bitch. The idea is so boring from the get-go (in a technological futurist sense; I'm not criticizing the game itself or saying it's not fun, because I haven't played it (but I saw the South Park episode, does that count?)) that I would think Science Fiction people would all want to distance themselves from it (unless they wanted to use it as a kind of dystopian example of failed dreams).
Having there just be one Metaverse (as Snow Crash seems to imply) is totally unrealistic, because there will (obviously?!) be so many different visions and agendas for what a metaverse should be. (And even if you limit the discussion to commercial exploitation, that includes deeply incompatible agendas, such as "my profit" vs "your profit.") Not that some won't be very popular, but there will never be one-size-fits-all. It's just human nature that no matter what you have, even if it gets a large userbase, there must be people who say, "This MUD is lame" or "This cabal is comprised of lamers" followed by "I'm going to make my own which fixes some problems."
If you don't hate the MCP then you're anti-freedom, and if you don't miss the MCP after Tron kills him then you're anti-order, anti-consistency, whatever. ;-) There's no right answer.
Vinge recognizes this with belief circles. Fragmentation happens, and you've got to include that if you want to seem realistic.
On top of the human nature issue, there's also the technical problem. All MMORPGs have a scaling problem to handle, and make tough choices and pay a cost, one way or another, to deal with it. Not only can you not fit everyone into one metaverse, it's also yet another crack for a schism to develop, because different people will want to pay the scaling cost in different ways.
If you look to WoW as the future, I think you're not keeping up. FWIW, though, I don't see Stephenson really implying that in the interview. AFAICT he's just talking about graphics hardware.
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.
The saddest thing about Phoronix is that even if you pay him it's still 38 ad-laden pages. That is, unless you remember to load the forum page first, before you RTFA. And he has known this for years (that's not an exaggeration), received numerous complaints from his paying customers about it (doesn't have the "I didn't know you people were unhappy" excuse) and still hasn't done anything about it.
And I really mean "sad." That is the best word to describe it. It's a (minor! I'll admit!) tragedy in the original sense of the word. The site is basically a good idea and otherwise handled well (for what it's intended to do), but is dooming itself simply because the central character refuses to see the elephant in the room that everyone else sees.
I don't hate Phoronix and will be sorry to see it go (tables of numbers have their place). And yet I'm probably not going to renew my support. Maybe its loss will make new room for the same niche, but with someone else handling this basic common-sense in-your-face aspect sensibly.
Yay, the worst of both worlds: no privacy and no law enforcement.
Yeah, now we just need to ask which side is being idealistic and which is being practical.
Person A: "Software needs to be maintainable!"
Person B: "Software needs to protect the reputation of related brands!"
The issue isn't whether Google is free to do that, or should be free to do that, or whether they are being good or evil. All that is completely irrelevant when you look at things as a user. The issue is what users get.
If you end up with something user-maintainable and user-verified-trustworthy, then it's going to pass the test from RMS' point if view. If you end up with a computer that you can't fix, it's not going to pass RMS' test.
In that respect, Google's recent Android releases, as well as many hardware manufacturers' releases, all fail the test, and it doesn't matter what their motivations are.
Many people don't care. They complete trust Google and the manufacturers without reservation. (And that's fine, IMHO, because if it turns out they're wrong, it's their problem. And if they're right, then end up with a computer which never annoys them.)
OTOH if you have in the past experienced unpleasantness with failure to obtain maintenance (whether that maintenance is good old fashioned bugfixes, or addition of features, or removal of anti-features), resulting in a bitter oath of "never again," then Android 3 and manufacturer-locked phones don't have what it takes. When you want to change something, you don't care why they decided to not let you change it; you just care that you can't do it.
I guess having some raw facts is a good start, but before we show this story to others, we need to put in something that explains the crash was an inevitable consequence of
(Pick at least one, though if you can blame the crash on several of the above items simultaneously, you get exponentially more points.)
Soulskill and jfruhlinger learn from the best.
I'm all for MS-flaming but how could anyone possibly be disappointed or shocked by this? It's like expecting 68k Macs to run PPC binaries. You might want it, just like you want a unicorn pony, but you don't say "OMG! NO UNIKORN PONIES? I THOT WE WERE GETTING THEM!!1 Y NOT? EVERYONE ELSE GETS UNIKORN PONIES! ANDROID ARMS HAVE XEON EMULATORS, MIRCO$OFT $UX!!"