A small quibble: the NSA-certified PDAs that military people use are not Blackberries, they're Windows-based PDAs. Same basic functionality, though.
Anyway, here's the big deal: those secure PDAs are used by many federal employees, but the President has never had one. The Secret Service doesn't like the idea of a device that might be used to track the guy they're protecting. More importantly, the President's lawyers don't like him to use any electronic media, even for non-governmental communication. They don't like the legal exposure. When Bush was elected, he told his family and friends not to expect any email from him until after he left office.
These problems are solvable, but pre-Obama, no President cared enough about online communication to push back at all the people telling him the only solution was to stay offline.
Great. Political argument via ignorant stereotype. I wish right wingers would grow up all ready and give us arguments based on their ideas instead of making fun of people who disagree with them. Who knows, you might actually convince people, instead of pissing them off. Try to remember why the U.S. elected a leftie President, even though most voters are pretty conservative.
There's a serious question behind your stupid babble, so I might as well answer it: it's not about privacy, it's about security. If a hacker can identify which wireless messages are coming from the President, he can figure out where he is and aim his heat-seeking missile accordingly.
And yes, I know there's an Obama-bashing comeback to what I just said. Please, please, grow up.
I've seen what it does to co-workers and friends who have them and have no desire to spend half of my next vacation (or weekend or day off) responding to e-mails that could wait.
You can always turn the thing off. "Gee, I must have been out of range!" Or just not check the thing more than every couple of hours. Your co-workers and friends' problem is not that they have BBs; its that they get all compulsive about keeping up with them.
Mind you, I won't ever get one either. Not because they're intrusive away from work, but because they're distracting at work. Some of us just aren't that good at divided attention tasks. Obviously we're wired much different from people who carry BBs, not to mention those geeks whose computer desktop always has an IM window and a bunch of RSS widgets.
Like I already said, that not an argument, that's just contradiction. You're telling me my analogy is bad and yours is good. You're not telling me why.
I suspect this is less about Arnold not being able to find the time than about the changes in his appearance. He's 25 years older, he's had heart-valve-replacement surgery, and although he's still physically active, he doesn't have the muscle-bound physique of his Pumping Iron days. A CGI Arnold will be a lot more convincing than the real thing!
A standard problem when you have people playing "android" robots. Actors age. (So do machines, but not the same way.) I think the main reason they killed off Data in the last Star Trek movie was the difficulty explaining away Brent Spinner's signs of age. So they set up a new character who's supposedly a sort of continuation of Data, all ready to to play the role in the next sequel — which, I dearly hope, never gets made.
BTW, every time our Governor is on the news, I keep expecting him to turn to the camera and say, "Ai ahm ah macheen!"
I mostly agree with your analysis (the SUV analogy is particularly apt) but I think you're making a very flawed assumption: that Sun's share of the x86 server market is as big as its going to get. As I've already argued, Oracle is in an excellent position to grow that market drastically.
There, did I break it down into nice little digestable brain-bites for you?
Yes you did! Thanks!
I know it's really lame, but somehow I've never been able to understand what people think unless they actually describe what they're thinking. Stupid, I know. But please be patient with people like me. I think you'll find that the skills you need to communicate with us will serve you well as you grow up. If you want to read more about this topic, it's called "conversation".
insofar as such characterizations got made, they were political sales pitches.
You mean like Reagan's big SDI speech where he promised to make nukes "impotent and obsolete"? Unless you think Reagan was nothing but a cynical con man (and if he was, he was a much better actor than a casual viewing of Kings Row suggests), that wasn't a political sales pitch, that was a heartfelt declaration of purpose.
As a matter of fact, I mostly agree with you. I just don't agree that there's any connection between Solaris's survival and the survival of Sun's x86 servers.
But yeah, the Oracle takeover is the best thing that could possibly happen to Sun's x86 products. Until now, they've been limited by the SPARC/Solaris Everwhere! mindset that still dominates Sun. (Better than it used to be — remember Cobalt? — but still pretty bad.) Now these servers will fall into the hands of a huge sales force that has no prejudice against commodity systems and is deeply connected to customers who are more than ready to buy them — especially if they come pre-integrated with an Oracle application stack.
All this assumes that Oracle plans to continue this product line. Lots of people are asserting that they'll shut it down or sell it off. But I'm seeing lots of signs that they actually intend to run with it. Hard to understand how they can squeeze $1.5 billion in profits from Sun in the first year any other way.
If they do do that, they are going to own the damned commodity server marketplace.
Uh, you are aware that electricity is very rarely sold on an "all-you-can-burn" basis? If your logic was consistent, then you should be arguing that everybody should pay the same rates for electricity, no matter how much they use.
had an ARPA grant while I was at Pixar. While the agency may have been its own part of DoD, I think you are overstating its independence from the military branches.
I never said it was at all independent from the other military branches. I was simply contradicting your statement that Internet research was funded by the Army.
Our project was entirely non-military, except that it encouraged companies producing 3D hardware in the U.S. to stay in business so that we would have a defense supply if such was needed. Anyone who did not understand that goal would have called it corporate welfare.
Do you have a point, or are you just free-associating? Because that story argues for the exact opposite of what you said above.
Not at all. Cloud computing will still work, if we can fix things so that this kind of outages doesn't happen every time some creep decides to cut a couple of cables.
And if we can't prevent this kind of outage, we're screwed, with or without cloud computing.
The way I said it was right. DARPA had Army and other DoD sponsorship.
That's nonsense. DARPA isn't "sponsored" by anybody. It's an arm of the DoD with it's own director and funding sources, completely separate from the army.
I said the scientists involved designed it to be militarily redundant.
Which is simply not true, though it's a popular myth.
The absence of a central node in this kind of network has nothing to do with military requirements. The creators of the technology simply observed that existing networks all had a finite capacity for growth because of their reliance on a master system that supervised all the other systems. The master system can only scale so far, and that's the limit of growth for any centralized network. Their solution was a network that had no master nodes, in which record-keeping was distributed.
This distributed record-keeping is strong evidence that the inventors of this technology were not thinking in military terms. Look at all the security problems we've had as a result. It worked fine when the Internet was a research resource maintained by a very informal (and very unmilitary!) cadre of computer scientists. But its current maintainers are constantly putting out fires that wouldn't have started if the designers had designed in security at the start.
Oh yeah, that's real John Wayne type security. Try Gomer Pyle!
Unfortunately, the main reference on the hospital is the ham coordinator, as quoted on ARRL's site:
In other words, you don't really know exactly why the Dominican network went down.
Now, you're going to say that the important thing is that the hospital network did go down. And you're right, it is. But if you're going to play cybernetic Paul Revere, try to get the part about "one if by land and two if by sea" right. Because yeah, the British are indeed coming. But if you keep confusing General Cornwalis with Darth Vader, your warnings are no use to anybody.
In other words, bidding at the last minute gives you a final chance to change your mind.
That's not improving your odds. That's just second guessing yourself. That's bad decision making, especially when you're doing it under time pressure. If $92 was too much to pay when you had time to think about it, it's not suddenly going to become a reasonable price just before the auction ends.
You said before that bidding early is a formula for losing. Well, winning isn't everything. If winning every auction is your primary goal, then you're going to buy a lot of stuff for a lot more than it's worth. If you want to get things at a reasonable price, you'll actually end up losing most auctions.
Especially on eBay, where most of the users seem to be like you, in it solely for the buzz of winning.
Bruce makes some good points, but he consistently undercuts himself "information" that is poorly sourced, poorly explained, or just plain wrong.
The question I'm most interested in is why the "internal only" network at Dominican Hospital went down. Bruce doesn't explain this, and I can't find a reference to it elsewhere. I suspect that he just has his facts wrong — Dominican is part of Catholic Healthcare West, and I'd be very surprised if the computers at Dominican didn't rely on servers in a central CHW facility.
That's still a dangerous vulnerability, just like Bruce says it is. But he'd be more persuasive if he checked his facts.
And dude, everybody but you knows that that internet technology research was funded by DARPA. Some DARPA personnel are in the Army, but DARPA has never been part of the Army.
And can we please stop repeating that idiotic myth about the Internet being designed to survive a nuclear attack? It isn't and it wasn't designed to be. The basis of the myth is that early proposals harped on the superior survival characteristic of a decentralized network versus the star topology networks of the time. Not quite the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
A small quibble: the NSA-certified PDAs that military people use are not Blackberries, they're Windows-based PDAs. Same basic functionality, though.
Anyway, here's the big deal: those secure PDAs are used by many federal employees, but the President has never had one. The Secret Service doesn't like the idea of a device that might be used to track the guy they're protecting. More importantly, the President's lawyers don't like him to use any electronic media, even for non-governmental communication. They don't like the legal exposure. When Bush was elected, he told his family and friends not to expect any email from him until after he left office.
These problems are solvable, but pre-Obama, no President cared enough about online communication to push back at all the people telling him the only solution was to stay offline.
Great. Political argument via ignorant stereotype. I wish right wingers would grow up all ready and give us arguments based on their ideas instead of making fun of people who disagree with them. Who knows, you might actually convince people, instead of pissing them off. Try to remember why the U.S. elected a leftie President, even though most voters are pretty conservative.
There's a serious question behind your stupid babble, so I might as well answer it: it's not about privacy, it's about security. If a hacker can identify which wireless messages are coming from the President, he can figure out where he is and aim his heat-seeking missile accordingly.
And yes, I know there's an Obama-bashing comeback to what I just said. Please, please, grow up.
I hope your cousin has managed to resist the urge to check his BB during sex. Don't laugh, it's a common thing.
I've seen what it does to co-workers and friends who have them and have no desire to spend half of my next vacation (or weekend or day off) responding to e-mails that could wait.
You can always turn the thing off. "Gee, I must have been out of range!" Or just not check the thing more than every couple of hours. Your co-workers and friends' problem is not that they have BBs; its that they get all compulsive about keeping up with them.
Mind you, I won't ever get one either. Not because they're intrusive away from work, but because they're distracting at work. Some of us just aren't that good at divided attention tasks. Obviously we're wired much different from people who carry BBs, not to mention those geeks whose computer desktop always has an IM window and a bunch of RSS widgets.
Like I already said, that not an argument, that's just contradiction. You're telling me my analogy is bad and yours is good. You're not telling me why.
You slashdotted Geocities! Most impressive!
Are the editors in some kind of contest to put up the lamest "Ask Slashdot" story? If so, they can end it right now — Timothy has definitely won.
Or maybe not. Somebody might ask "why doesn't my computer work when it's not plugged in?"
They didn't, and it's a horrible movie.
I assumed it would be. That's why I made a point of reading as many spoilers as I could stomach, so I wouldn't be tempted to actually see it.
Logically, I shouldn't care. The fact that I do is probably the last vestige of my Trekkieness.
I suspect this is less about Arnold not being able to find the time than about the changes in his appearance. He's 25 years older, he's had heart-valve-replacement surgery, and although he's still physically active, he doesn't have the muscle-bound physique of his Pumping Iron days. A CGI Arnold will be a lot more convincing than the real thing!
A standard problem when you have people playing "android" robots. Actors age. (So do machines, but not the same way.) I think the main reason they killed off Data in the last Star Trek movie was the difficulty explaining away Brent Spinner's signs of age. So they set up a new character who's supposedly a sort of continuation of Data, all ready to to play the role in the next sequel — which, I dearly hope, never gets made.
BTW, every time our Governor is on the news, I keep expecting him to turn to the camera and say, "Ai ahm ah macheen!"
I mostly agree with your analysis (the SUV analogy is particularly apt) but I think you're making a very flawed assumption: that Sun's share of the x86 server market is as big as its going to get. As I've already argued, Oracle is in an excellent position to grow that market drastically.
Unclarity: "How slow of reflexes do you have?"
There, did I break it down into nice little digestable brain-bites for you?
Yes you did! Thanks!
I know it's really lame, but somehow I've never been able to understand what people think unless they actually describe what they're thinking. Stupid, I know. But please be patient with people like me. I think you'll find that the skills you need to communicate with us will serve you well as you grow up. If you want to read more about this topic, it's called "conversation".
insofar as such characterizations got made, they were political sales pitches.
You mean like Reagan's big SDI speech where he promised to make nukes "impotent and obsolete"? Unless you think Reagan was nothing but a cynical con man (and if he was, he was a much better actor than a casual viewing of Kings Row suggests), that wasn't a political sales pitch, that was a heartfelt declaration of purpose.
My mistake. I read that Oracle was borrowing money to cover this deal, and assumed it was because they had to.
As a matter of fact, I mostly agree with you. I just don't agree that there's any connection between Solaris's survival and the survival of Sun's x86 servers.
But yeah, the Oracle takeover is the best thing that could possibly happen to Sun's x86 products. Until now, they've been limited by the SPARC/Solaris Everwhere! mindset that still dominates Sun. (Better than it used to be — remember Cobalt? — but still pretty bad.) Now these servers will fall into the hands of a huge sales force that has no prejudice against commodity systems and is deeply connected to customers who are more than ready to buy them — especially if they come pre-integrated with an Oracle application stack.
All this assumes that Oracle plans to continue this product line. Lots of people are asserting that they'll shut it down or sell it off. But I'm seeing lots of signs that they actually intend to run with it. Hard to understand how they can squeeze $1.5 billion in profits from Sun in the first year any other way.
If they do do that, they are going to own the damned commodity server marketplace.
Uh, you are aware that electricity is very rarely sold on an "all-you-can-burn" basis? If your logic was consistent, then you should be arguing that everybody should pay the same rates for electricity, no matter how much they use.
If you don't like my analogies, tell me what's wrong with them. But stop contradicting me like some whiny 5-year old.
You are claiming stuff out of thin air with no proof.
I have to "prove" that a business has to cover its costs or go out of business?
Ok then, there's this thing called money...
had an ARPA grant while I was at Pixar. While the agency may have been its own part of DoD, I think you are overstating its independence from the military branches.
I never said it was at all independent from the other military branches. I was simply contradicting your statement that Internet research was funded by the Army.
Our project was entirely non-military, except that it encouraged companies producing 3D hardware in the U.S. to stay in business so that we would have a defense supply if such was needed. Anyone who did not understand that goal would have called it corporate welfare.
Do you have a point, or are you just free-associating? Because that story argues for the exact opposite of what you said above.
Not at all. Cloud computing will still work, if we can fix things so that this kind of outages doesn't happen every time some creep decides to cut a couple of cables.
And if we can't prevent this kind of outage, we're screwed, with or without cloud computing.
The way I said it was right. DARPA had Army and other DoD sponsorship.
That's nonsense. DARPA isn't "sponsored" by anybody. It's an arm of the DoD with it's own director and funding sources, completely separate from the army.
I said the scientists involved designed it to be militarily redundant.
Which is simply not true, though it's a popular myth.
The absence of a central node in this kind of network has nothing to do with military requirements. The creators of the technology simply observed that existing networks all had a finite capacity for growth because of their reliance on a master system that supervised all the other systems. The master system can only scale so far, and that's the limit of growth for any centralized network. Their solution was a network that had no master nodes, in which record-keeping was distributed.
This distributed record-keeping is strong evidence that the inventors of this technology were not thinking in military terms. Look at all the security problems we've had as a result. It worked fine when the Internet was a research resource maintained by a very informal (and very unmilitary!) cadre of computer scientists. But its current maintainers are constantly putting out fires that wouldn't have started if the designers had designed in security at the start.
Oh yeah, that's real John Wayne type security. Try Gomer Pyle!
Unfortunately, the main reference on the hospital is the ham coordinator, as quoted on ARRL's site:
In other words, you don't really know exactly why the Dominican network went down.
Now, you're going to say that the important thing is that the hospital network did go down. And you're right, it is. But if you're going to play cybernetic Paul Revere, try to get the part about "one if by land and two if by sea" right. Because yeah, the British are indeed coming. But if you keep confusing General Cornwalis with Darth Vader, your warnings are no use to anybody.
In other words, bidding at the last minute gives you a final chance to change your mind.
That's not improving your odds. That's just second guessing yourself. That's bad decision making, especially when you're doing it under time pressure. If $92 was too much to pay when you had time to think about it, it's not suddenly going to become a reasonable price just before the auction ends.
You said before that bidding early is a formula for losing. Well, winning isn't everything. If winning every auction is your primary goal, then you're going to buy a lot of stuff for a lot more than it's worth. If you want to get things at a reasonable price, you'll actually end up losing most auctions.
Especially on eBay, where most of the users seem to be like you, in it solely for the buzz of winning.
Bruce makes some good points, but he consistently undercuts himself "information" that is poorly sourced, poorly explained, or just plain wrong.
The question I'm most interested in is why the "internal only" network at Dominican Hospital went down. Bruce doesn't explain this, and I can't find a reference to it elsewhere. I suspect that he just has his facts wrong — Dominican is part of Catholic Healthcare West, and I'd be very surprised if the computers at Dominican didn't rely on servers in a central CHW facility.
That's still a dangerous vulnerability, just like Bruce says it is. But he'd be more persuasive if he checked his facts.
And dude, everybody but you knows that that internet technology research was funded by DARPA. Some DARPA personnel are in the Army, but DARPA has never been part of the Army.
And can we please stop repeating that idiotic myth about the Internet being designed to survive a nuclear attack? It isn't and it wasn't designed to be. The basis of the myth is that early proposals harped on the superior survival characteristic of a decentralized network versus the star topology networks of the time. Not quite the same thing.
In other words, you have nothing to say. I think I'll change my sig to say "If you have nothing to say — STFU!"