"the more urgent task is to [...] recover the data"
Huh? Does this mean that UT no longer has the data? That the FBI will have to go around to thousands of FTP servers and gather together a few bits here, a few bits there?
This theft metaphor just doesn't work with "stolen secrets", and never has. Once someone has discovered your secret, and told someone else, you can't get it back. It's not the data that was removed, but only the secrecy.
This whole "new BIOS" concept falls short of the obvious. Why not use a slightly more generous-sized but still fairly cheap flash memory (that can be copied, or maybe mapped, into normal virtual address space), and put the kernel and some of the more basic parts of the OS into it, and eliminate the loader? My root filesystems are typically only 64Mbytes. Flash memories can be rewritten many more times than I'll ever upgrade my OS. How about a tiny "RAM disk" to provide the parts of a root filesystem that have to be writeable (mount points,/dev)? Initialize it from read-only/bin,/sbin, and kernel in flash.
All the "BIOS vendor" needs to supply is a little protected part that initializes the hardware, and allows the bigger part of the flash memory to be written from the ethernet.
I just can't wait! I'm sure that a high resolution splash screen instead of real information about the progress of the self test will boost my productivity, and reduce the total cost of ownership tremendously!
This indicates just how desperate the industry is to keep the market from saturating.
"More than 80 percent of respondents across the country understood how to work a TV better than a computer, something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard."
Uh, you maybe you haven't noticed that "working a TV" isn't working at all, it's just sitting and staring. General-purpose computers are never going to be easy to work, and shouldn't be, simply because they're general-purpose. How many people have difficulty working engine-control computers in their cars?
The sad situation is that most of those people have no need or use for general-purpose computers, but getting them to contribute billions of dollars to the cause brings the prices down for the few of us who do. It's modern manufacturing. We can make mobile phones at give-away prices because we invested hundreds of millions of dollars in factories to make them. If you want to repair them when they break, you'll have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a repair facility.
1. Software is still a lot better, and a lot more secure, than the alternatives. Imagine running an insurance company without it.
2. Most of the trouble with software is just overarching ambition. There's no way that millions and millions of lines of interconnected code will ever work consistently, reliably, and securely. But it's just too tempting to add more features, more chrome and tail fins, than to concentrate on the problem to be solved and remove everything that doesn't help solve it.
Isn't this a two-edged sword? What if that "friend" remembers, and is willing to testify, that that "Seemingly innocent comment" wasn't so innocent at all? Wouldn't it be helpful to have documentation of the comment *and the context* to support your argument that he remembers it wrong?
Dr. Weinberg apparently had never taken a very close look at the hidden bits of a typical modern office building, the "mechanicals" like air conditioning and electrical wiring.
And the documentation? You mean drawings that show where the wires are now?
"...connecting cables from mouse (keyboard, monitor, scanner, network hub, etc) to computer, not just visual astetics. One look behind my desk at home (or the office) shows just what I worry about. Sure, you can bundle the cables together, but even then they make an auful mess."
Am I the only one who finds aesthetic value in "function over form"? I want the working bits to not just work easily, but to look like they are made to work easily. Doesn't anybody else think it's just dumb for the keyboard cable to plug into the middle of the back, when the keyboard itself is more likely to be in the front? Do you want your mouse to be as hard to find as the TV remote?
I *hate* hidden cable connectors. Even more than I hate digging around in the back, under the desk, in the dark, I *like* the visual aesthetics of functional stuff.
According to this article on Salon 1120 million people don't even have clean water. That's twice as many as have Internet access, one in six of all the people in the world.
But sewage treatment plants aren't as glamorous as 'net access.
Yes to a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. And a cooler for that processor. And Ethernet. But a floppy and a CD-ROM? Just to install the system software the first time, and then never used again?
Please, when can we get just a little bit of simple code in the bootrom to do that initial installation over the net?
And I'd also like to get rid of all the "expansion slots" (ISA?!?), and use the PC-board real estate to put a nice video interface and Ethernet adapter in surface mount.
I read somewhere years ago (P.J.Plauger, maybe?) that you should take the the programmer's initial optimistic estimate, and then apply two irrational factors, to account for irrational stuff you can't account for.
The two irrational factors are pi and e, so you multiply the programmer's estimate by about 8.5.
In order to display graphics for multiple processes on the same display at the same time you pretty much have to have some sort of client/server architecture. Since 4.2BSD the easiest way to do the communication between clients and the server has been using sockets? Perhaps that's why X does it that way?
"GNUstep is catching up very quickly for a project that, before today, you may not have known exists."
The reason you didn't know it exists is that it has been catching up very, very slowly for many years.
I have looked at GNUstep several times over the years, and their web sites always showed very little info and no progress. Kind of a disappointment, really, considering that it was just a clone of work that had already been done.
Re:Personalization? Creepy...
on
Making It Personal
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I absolutely agree, and I'm an "older people" (over 50). I'm offended by sales 'droids calling me by name, and very much more so when they can't pronounce it. (Are telephone solicitors trained to never pronounce names reasonably? It's always a clue that I don't want the call.)
I suppose it is a difference in personality. Businesses should tag customer records with "likes to think we know him" vs. "prefers anonymity". But I always wind up in the supermarket checkout line *behind* the customer who wants to chat.
1. Initialize all the programmable chips so the board can come up and run.
2. A quick self-test to make sure that everything looks like it's basically working.
3. Offer the option of a more extensive self-test to provide some assurance that weird behavior is not a hardware problem.
4. Load a bootstrap loader from *any* I/O device on the board that might be practical. If the board has an Ethernet interface, it must be able to boot from that. If not, then perhaps from a serial port. This is for initial system installation. Normally you'd boot from the disc controller, of course.
5. Not require any equipment that's not permanently attached to the motherboard, i.e., if you don't know you've got a keyboard and a local video display, then use the Ethernet (preferably) or a serial port for operator control. Load the loader unattended if there's no operator present.
6. A remote reset sure would be nice if you could make sure you could keep it out of the hands of the jokers.
With all that and a 100Mbit Ethernet, the admin could reinstall the officially-approved software on the luser's workstation in a few minutes, without getting out of his own chair, and without having to walk the luser through any complicated procedure like finding the reset button and pressing it, let alone finding some special floppy or CD. And not just luser's workstations, servers, too. once the power and the Ethernet are plugged in you'd never have to turn the lights on in the server room again.
Do any of your target platforms not have ksh88? PDKSH is rock solid, and the few incompatibilities are insignificant and documented. I believe OpenBSD uses it as/bin/sh. I've been using it for years and highly recommend it.
Alternatively, the FreeBSD/bin/sh could probably be ported to linux pretty easily. I believe it's derived from ash. I don't think it's perfectly compatible with Bourne's original, though.
> what is the point of opening up the TLDs?
> Companies are just going to have to buy the
> ones (or sue to steal them back) that infringe
> upon them.
You can keep creating top level domains 'til you're blue in the face, the guys with money and lawyers will keep grabbing 'em.
How about TLDs for the various stock exchanges, like.NYSE,.NASDAQ,.Nikkei? The second level domains *must* be the registered stock symbols of the officially registered stocks on each exchange, and the holders of those 2nd level domains must *not* be allowed to register under any other domain. Then one or a few TLDs (.unregistered?) for all the rest of us, where stock corporations are *not* allowed to register at all.
Furrfu, what a Kludge! Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot more obvious to add just a little bit of code to the Flash "BIOS" to make all the "BIOS" configuration options available to a serial port, or better still an SSH session on the Ethernet, and to boot from Ethernet? Instead of adding more hardware you could eliminate the floppy disk drive, and the video and keyboard on any machine that's not being used as an interactive workstation.
This is no paradigm shift. This is just more of what we've been working on for forty years. Think about dynamic page swapping. Think about routing protocols. Most of the work in the design of systems and networks has always been to get these things to automatically manage themselves, in real time.
The focus on interactive computing in the last fifteen years has just kept attention away from the ongoing work in this area.
But then, maybe people don't really want automation, maybe they'd really rather participate more, not less.
Let's take a pragmatic look at this. We can't even get people to upgrade their software after they've been 0wned by Code Red. How can we expect them to upgrade their encryption software?
These people are not stupid. What's really going on here?
It's got to be about money, or power, or both. Who benefits from this? I can no longer believe these people care at all about who they can put in prison. We already have so many in prison that running prisons is big business.
Slashdot Mirror
"the more urgent task is to [...] recover the data"
Huh? Does this mean that UT no longer has the data? That the FBI will have to go around to thousands of FTP servers and gather together a few bits here, a few bits there?
This theft metaphor just doesn't work with "stolen secrets", and never has. Once someone has discovered your secret, and told someone else, you can't get it back. It's not the data that was removed, but only the secrecy.
This whole "new BIOS" concept falls short of the obvious. Why not use a slightly more generous-sized but still fairly cheap flash memory (that can be copied, or maybe mapped, into normal virtual address space), and put the kernel and some of the more basic parts of the OS into it, and eliminate the loader? My root filesystems are typically only 64Mbytes. Flash memories can be rewritten many more times than I'll ever upgrade my OS. How about a tiny "RAM disk" to provide the parts of a root filesystem that have to be writeable (mount points, /dev)? Initialize it from read-only /bin, /sbin, and kernel in flash.
All the "BIOS vendor" needs to supply is a little protected part that initializes the hardware, and allows the bigger part of the flash memory to be written from the ethernet.
I just can't wait! I'm sure that a high resolution splash screen instead of real information about the progress of the self test will boost my productivity, and reduce the total cost of ownership tremendously!
This indicates just how desperate the industry is to keep the market from saturating.
"More than 80 percent of respondents across the country understood how to work a TV better than a computer, something for the computer industry to ponder long and hard."
Uh, you maybe you haven't noticed that "working a TV" isn't working at all, it's just sitting and staring. General-purpose computers are never going to be easy to work, and shouldn't be, simply because they're general-purpose. How many people have difficulty working engine-control computers in their cars?
The sad situation is that most of those people have no need or use for general-purpose computers, but getting them to contribute billions of dollars to the cause brings the prices down for the few of us who do. It's modern manufacturing. We can make mobile phones at give-away prices because we invested hundreds of millions of dollars in factories to make them. If you want to repair them when they break, you'll have to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a repair facility.
"Computers can be found everywhere but in the productivity statistics." --Robert Solow
;-)
Somebody important has also noticed. I feel vindicated
I hate this attitude! Life is too short to evaluate everything that's announced on Freshmeat. Why can't you honestly share your experience?
Two points:
1. Software is still a lot better, and a lot more secure, than the alternatives. Imagine running an insurance company without it.
2. Most of the trouble with software is just overarching ambition. There's no way that millions and millions of lines of interconnected code will ever work consistently, reliably, and securely. But it's just too tempting to add more features, more chrome and tail fins, than to concentrate on the problem to be solved and remove everything that doesn't help solve it.
Isn't this a two-edged sword? What if that "friend" remembers, and is willing to testify, that that "Seemingly innocent comment" wasn't so innocent at all? Wouldn't it be helpful to have documentation of the comment *and the context* to support your argument that he remembers it wrong?
Dr. Weinberg apparently had never taken a very close look at the hidden bits of a typical modern office building, the "mechanicals" like air conditioning and electrical wiring.
And the documentation? You mean drawings that show where the wires are now?
"...connecting cables from mouse (keyboard, monitor, scanner, network hub, etc) to computer, not just visual astetics. One look behind my desk at home (or the office) shows just what I worry about. Sure, you can bundle the cables together, but even then they make an auful mess."
Am I the only one who finds aesthetic value in "function over form"? I want the working bits to not just work easily, but to look like they are made to work easily. Doesn't anybody else think it's just dumb for the keyboard cable to plug into the middle of the back, when the keyboard itself is more likely to be in the front? Do you want your mouse to be as hard to find as the TV remote?
I *hate* hidden cable connectors. Even more than I hate digging around in the back, under the desk, in the dark, I *like* the visual aesthetics of functional stuff.
But sewage treatment plants aren't as glamorous as 'net access.
Yes to a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. And a cooler for that processor. And Ethernet. But a floppy and a CD-ROM? Just to install the system software the first time, and then never used again?
Please, when can we get just a little bit of simple code in the bootrom to do that initial installation over the net?
And I'd also like to get rid of all the "expansion slots" (ISA?!?), and use the PC-board real estate to put a nice video interface and Ethernet adapter in surface mount.
I read somewhere years ago (P.J.Plauger, maybe?) that you should take the the programmer's initial optimistic estimate, and then apply two irrational factors, to account for irrational stuff you can't account for.
The two irrational factors are pi and e, so you multiply the programmer's estimate by about 8.5.
In order to display graphics for multiple processes on the same display at the same time you pretty much have to have some sort of client/server architecture. Since 4.2BSD the easiest way to do the communication between clients and the server has been using sockets? Perhaps that's why X does it that way?
What alternative do you propose?
"GNUstep is catching up very quickly for a project that, before today, you may not have known exists."
The reason you didn't know it exists is that it has been catching up very, very slowly for many years.
I have looked at GNUstep several times over the years, and their web sites always showed very little info and no progress. Kind of a disappointment, really, considering that it was just a clone of work that had already been done.
I absolutely agree, and I'm an "older people" (over 50). I'm offended by sales 'droids calling me by name, and very much more so when they can't pronounce it. (Are telephone solicitors trained to never pronounce names reasonably? It's always a clue that I don't want the call.)
I suppose it is a difference in personality. Businesses should tag customer records with "likes to think we know him" vs. "prefers anonymity". But I always wind up in the supermarket checkout line *behind* the customer who wants to chat.
Oops! Click the link first, dummy. December 29, 1959. 42 years.
Um, hasn't it been more like 40 years? Or actually 39? I thought the speech was New Year's Eve 1962.
1. Initialize all the programmable chips so the board can come up and run.
2. A quick self-test to make sure that everything looks like it's basically working.
3. Offer the option of a more extensive self-test to provide some assurance that weird behavior is not a hardware problem.
4. Load a bootstrap loader from *any* I/O device on the board that might be practical. If the board has an Ethernet interface, it must be able to boot from that. If not, then perhaps from a serial port. This is for initial system installation. Normally you'd boot from the disc controller, of course.
5. Not require any equipment that's not permanently attached to the motherboard, i.e., if you don't know you've got a keyboard and a local video display, then use the Ethernet (preferably) or a serial port for operator control. Load the loader unattended if there's no operator present.
6. A remote reset sure would be nice if you could make sure you could keep it out of the hands of the jokers.
With all that and a 100Mbit Ethernet, the admin could reinstall the officially-approved software on the luser's workstation in a few minutes, without getting out of his own chair, and without having to walk the luser through any complicated procedure like finding the reset button and pressing it, let alone finding some special floppy or CD. And not just luser's workstations, servers, too. once the power and the Ethernet are plugged in you'd never have to turn the lights on in the server room again.
Do any of your target platforms not have ksh88? PDKSH is rock solid, and the few incompatibilities are insignificant and documented. I believe OpenBSD uses it as /bin/sh. I've been using it for years and highly recommend it.
/bin/sh could probably be ported to linux pretty easily. I believe it's derived from ash. I don't think it's perfectly compatible with Bourne's original, though.
Alternatively, the FreeBSD
> what is the point of opening up the TLDs?
.NYSE, .NASDAQ, .Nikkei? The second level domains *must* be the registered stock symbols of the officially registered stocks on each exchange, and the holders of those 2nd level domains must *not* be allowed to register under any other domain. Then one or a few TLDs (.unregistered?) for all the rest of us, where stock corporations are *not* allowed to register at all.
> Companies are just going to have to buy the
> ones (or sue to steal them back) that infringe
> upon them.
You can keep creating top level domains 'til you're blue in the face, the guys with money and lawyers will keep grabbing 'em.
How about TLDs for the various stock exchanges, like
Furrfu, what a Kludge! Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot more obvious to add just a little bit of code to the Flash "BIOS" to make all the "BIOS" configuration options available to a serial port, or better still an SSH session on the Ethernet, and to boot from Ethernet? Instead of adding more hardware you could eliminate the floppy disk drive, and the video and keyboard on any machine that's not being used as an interactive workstation.
This is no paradigm shift. This is just more of what we've been working on for forty years. Think about dynamic page swapping. Think about routing protocols. Most of the work in the design of systems and networks has always been to get these things to automatically manage themselves, in real time.
The focus on interactive computing in the last fifteen years has just kept attention away from the ongoing work in this area.
But then, maybe people don't really want automation, maybe they'd really rather participate more, not less.
Let's take a pragmatic look at this. We can't even get people to upgrade their software after they've been 0wned by Code Red. How can we expect them to upgrade their encryption software?
These people are not stupid. What's really going on here?
It's got to be about money, or power, or both. Who benefits from this? I can no longer believe these people care at all about who they can put in prison. We already have so many in prison that running prisons is big business.
Who benefits?