There have been several major computer projects that started as Government mandates. Few have produced significant results...
Introducing encryption between the kernel and the hardware disk subsystem is bound to create unexpected and unintended problems with applications. It's doable but the matrix of testing required and the feedback loop with developers/vendors would have to be strong and immediate.
Can you imagine trying to debug an application that interoperates with an encrypted file system and the encryption techniques are a secret...
It's going to be a mess but most government driven IT projects are nightmares anyway. Of course, no one close to the project will be able to disclose any details. So, tech novelists need to start creating plausible scenarios right away. "Wargames III - the day the laptops froze" : PLOT: the US Government believes their portable computers have been hacked... in the end they determine it was a encryption software bug that surfaced once every N years. (N to be determined by the potential funding for Wargames IV).
I'm going to see if I can get some encrypted business cards. Data needs protection... from use.
Listen to an old timer slackers... Live to learn
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
We had a similar discussion regarding Novell and TCP/IP... TCP/IP was PROVEN to be slower, used more memory and cost more to support. Score ONE for the market leader.
We revisted the discussion withg VMS vs Unix. VMS was PROVEN to be faster, more resource efficient and delived a safer support value system.
When they suggested that we should drop our elegant and highly reliable SNA network for the Internet, we did the benchmarks and showed that security was impossible to guarantee for critical data when we didn't control the WAN. Don't GO there...
Product are market leaders for a reason... because they sell more than anything and these "try this/it's free" proponents will never hire enough seasoned resources to out-code a market leader that has a revenue stream on the order of Billions/year. It's a simple investment verity! One-Billion downloads at $0 is $0 in revenue. It's worse than that... who pays for the servers and downloads. Think ROI!
Why we need to revisit this issue again and again is beyond me.
Some people just never learn from history. The author of the article seems to have some experience in predicting the best use of IT investments.
I need to get back to my Cobol account app that needs new patches for our brilliant Web/3270 frontend release.
You slashdotters just need to learn from your wiser, older IT system analysts before we die off. It's almost too late! There is no such thing as a free lunch... Lunch doesn't just grow in trees. Your lunch gets cooked in factories like the think tanks in Redmond and Armonk and Cupertino. Chao.
Microsft has been characterized by their actions over the years as predatory... even when it hurt the bottom line. They would target and squash a company just because they could... because they relished a cutthroat style of competition to get motivated.
If I could get an ear within MS I'd try to get them to admit to themselves that the Internet made them more money and the Internet was entirely structured from Open Standards... ethernet, TCP/IP, sockets, HTML over HTTP and on and on... They profitted enormously from NOT fighting these standards... no dial-up MSN only.
The reason for this is the Rising Tide effect. More investment is poured into a market and most companies benefit in some ratio to their marketshare... there's some shifting but the big winners accelerate adoption and don't fight the new standards that are causing the explosive growth.
Microsoft saw the benefits and only tried minor hacks to the standards (DHTML for example).
When microsoft realizes that having your only significant competitor cost almost nothing they should have the next big Eureka moment. The way to destroy the Sun, HP, and IBM Unix businesses is to accelerate the enterprise adoption of Linux.
Oracle got it... if they spend less on Sun, HP and IBM hardware they have more budget for our products... duh. IT budgets are finite... growth comes from getting more of the budget.
Sun, HP and IBM could be effectively driven out of the Enterprise software business. Enterprise deployments of big applications goes crazy based upon new cost models and Microsoft's boat rises on that new high tide.
The logical extension is commercial Linux versions of their higher margin products (MS SQL, Visual Studio) and even more growth as a company when the only other significant alternative is an OSS project with little revenue to help it compete for Enterprise requirements.
That's what I might tell this guy to explain to Bill gates and Bill of course would sob gently... "You mean we've already won? There's no one left to kill? Just mine the veins we already own?." Well... there is Oracle still.
Bill will likely develop an interest in politics where dirty tricks still mean something.
Quality is still a happy user. Users like software the works well and hopefully doesn't need a lot of documentation to make it work well. Great software tends to teach the user how to make it perofmr or at least motivate the user to want ot invest the time to master the software for a particular use.
These guys need to understand that this approach to quality applies to all software, irrespective of development model behind it. A software product with a lot of customers creates the momentum to maintain and enhance that product. An OSS product can be infused with similar energy due to acceptance by a large community of users (esp if many are programmer's too). The feedback from the users incents the programmers to maintain and enhance the product.
New models can be built from hybrids of OSS (donated programming in the commons) and products that one must buy. If there emerges an ERP OSS app then there will be a business opportunity to document/train, support/fix/enhance/customize that application... and Oracle will feel the same frustration competing with that model that MS does competing with Linux.
These complaints against OSS as a model (no obtion to buy support or docs) are a business opportunity that has been put into play by JBOSS, MySQL, and soon to be hundreds of others. The low barrier to entry is the key to high usage... It's try and don't buy (unless you'd like some training, customization, focus product enhancements, etc).
Volume, usage and effectiveness drives the software world. Quality just makes the ride more comfortable. And OSS gets more comfortable everytime the train puls through the station.
Yes... Clustra was a "clustered" database that ran on multiple nodes and delivered 99.999% availability. I believe Sun wanted it to strengthen it's J2EE deliverable... i.e. make java persistent with an HA object store on layer three.
I suspect they have now fully integrated Clustra with their J2EE App Server and are close to publicly making the technology available.
It should be useful for web-based apps that want a most memory resident database (for performance) with HA features to off-set the risks of running a business out of RAM and the potential loss of transacations.
Hopefully, Sun will release the software freely but that will be the key feature of the announcement.... what OS'es and will the source be posted for tweaking or extensions.
The Clustra SQL support was supposed to be pretty good... the demo was awesome. Especially for real-time applications like phone call processing.
Now assume there are hundreds of audio objects out on the internet in these formats.
Someone is paying fees in accordance with the licensing terms you went to check out.
You (indirectly) are supporting those fees.
The average slashdot poster wants files and data to be free whenever possible. This is one of those instances where they will speak up for the free file format... It would cost Apple very little to add this support but they own the music store too so... can you see a conflict of interest. Sony owns Columbia... We live in a world of conflicting interests...
Ogg Vorbis is engineering effort in the public interest. This is goodness...
Does this help. It will matter over the long run. Fight the problem now.
Free should be encouraged for all data formats. Maybe some governments that are not owned by business interests will mandate such standard practices since WE OWN OUR OWN DATA (or should).
MS has us ALL by the short hairs because we gave them our data and paid for the privilege. What were we thinking ("pretty printouts").
Open Orifice to the rescue.
A FREE way to get your own data back off the MS reservation.
Since WMA and ACC are MS and Apple proprietary, I'd expect the PODcasting phenomena to re-invigorate MP3 as a common supported format. You can assume cross-platform support w/ MP3 and you can't assume the same with the MS/Apple wars making life difficult. The content creator with PODcasting will be millions of wannabee "broadcasters"... Millions.
The backbone routers will feel your pain... the telcos will love the extra usage billing and someone will need to figure out how to pay for it all.
The suddenly successful POCcaster will find that the ISP has shut their link down do to overuse. Slashdot a great PODcast and you'll see what I mean. There is no free lunch when you are passing out 40MB downloads and have a few thousand potential listeners...
Slashdot Mirror
There have been several major computer projects that started as Government mandates.
Few have produced significant results...
Introducing encryption between the kernel and the hardware disk subsystem is bound to create
unexpected and unintended problems with applications. It's doable but the matrix of testing required
and the feedback loop with developers/vendors would have to be strong and immediate.
Can you imagine trying to debug an application that interoperates with an encrypted file system and
the encryption techniques are a secret...
It's going to be a mess but most government driven IT projects are nightmares anyway. Of course, no one
close to the project will be able to disclose any details. So, tech novelists need to start creating
plausible scenarios right away. "Wargames III - the day the laptops froze" : PLOT: the US Government believes their
portable computers have been hacked... in the end they determine it was a encryption software bug that
surfaced once every N years. (N to be determined by the potential funding for Wargames IV).
I'm going to see if I can get some encrypted business cards. Data needs protection... from use.
We had a similar discussion regarding Novell and TCP/IP...
TCP/IP was PROVEN to be slower, used more memory and cost more to support.
Score ONE for the market leader.
We revisted the discussion withg VMS vs Unix.
VMS was PROVEN to be faster, more resource efficient and delived a safer support value system.
When they suggested that we should drop our elegant and highly reliable SNA network
for the Internet, we did the benchmarks and showed that security was impossible
to guarantee for critical data when we didn't control the WAN. Don't GO there...
Product are market leaders for a reason... because they sell more than anything
and these "try this/it's free" proponents will never hire enough seasoned resources to
out-code a market leader that has a revenue stream on the order of Billions/year.
It's a simple investment verity! One-Billion downloads at $0 is $0 in revenue.
It's worse than that... who pays for the servers and downloads. Think ROI!
Why we need to revisit this issue again and again is beyond me.
Some people just never learn from history. The author of the article
seems to have some experience in predicting the best use of
IT investments.
I need to get back to my Cobol account app that needs new patches
for our brilliant Web/3270 frontend release.
You slashdotters just need to learn from your wiser, older IT system analysts
before we die off. It's almost too late! There is no such thing as a free lunch...
Lunch doesn't just grow in trees. Your lunch gets cooked in factories like the
think tanks in Redmond and Armonk and Cupertino. Chao.
It just deosn't make sense.
If it sounds to good to be true...
Microsft has been characterized by their actions over the years as predatory... even when it hurt the bottom line. They would target and squash a company just because they could... because they relished a cutthroat style of competition to get motivated.
If I could get an ear within MS I'd try to get them to admit to themselves that the Internet made them more money and the Internet was entirely structured from Open Standards... ethernet, TCP/IP, sockets, HTML over HTTP and on and on... They profitted enormously from NOT fighting these standards... no dial-up MSN only.
The reason for this is the Rising Tide effect.
More investment is poured into a market and most companies benefit in some ratio to their marketshare... there's some shifting but the big winners accelerate adoption and don't fight the new standards that are causing the explosive growth.
Microsoft saw the benefits and only tried minor hacks to the standards (DHTML for example).
When microsoft realizes that having your only significant competitor cost almost nothing they should have the next big Eureka moment. The way to destroy the Sun, HP, and IBM Unix businesses is to accelerate the enterprise adoption of Linux.
Oracle got it... if they spend less on Sun, HP and IBM hardware they have more budget for our products... duh. IT budgets are finite... growth comes from getting more of the budget.
Sun, HP and IBM could be effectively driven out of the Enterprise software business. Enterprise deployments of big applications goes crazy based upon new cost models and Microsoft's boat rises on that new high tide.
The logical extension is commercial Linux versions of their higher margin products (MS SQL, Visual Studio) and even more growth as a company when
the only other significant alternative is an OSS project with little revenue to help it compete for Enterprise requirements.
That's what I might tell this guy to explain to Bill gates and Bill of course would sob gently...
"You mean we've already won? There's no one left to kill? Just mine the veins we already own?."
Well... there is Oracle still.
Bill will likely develop an interest in politics where dirty tricks still mean something.
McD
Quality is still a happy user. Users like software
the works well and hopefully doesn't need a lot of documentation to make it work well. Great software
tends to teach the user how to make it perofmr or at least motivate the user to want ot invest the time to master the software for a particular use.
These guys need to understand that this approach to quality applies to all software, irrespective of
development model behind it. A software product with a lot of customers creates the momentum to maintain and enhance that product. An OSS product can be infused with similar energy due to acceptance by a large community of users (esp if many are programmer's too). The feedback from the users incents the programmers to maintain and enhance the product.
New models can be built from hybrids of OSS (donated programming in the commons) and products
that one must buy. If there emerges an ERP OSS app then there will be a business opportunity to document/train, support/fix/enhance/customize that application... and Oracle will feel the same frustration competing with that model that MS does competing with Linux.
These complaints against OSS as a model (no obtion to buy support or docs) are a business opportunity
that has been put into play by JBOSS, MySQL, and soon to be hundreds of others. The low barrier to entry is the key to high usage... It's try and don't buy (unless you'd like some training, customization, focus product enhancements, etc).
Volume, usage and effectiveness drives the software world. Quality just makes the ride more comfortable. And OSS gets more comfortable everytime the train puls through the station.
Yes... Clustra was a
"clustered" database that ran on multiple nodes
and delivered 99.999% availability. I believe Sun wanted it to strengthen it's J2EE deliverable...
i.e. make java persistent with an HA object store
on layer three.
I suspect they have now fully integrated Clustra
with their J2EE App Server and are close to publicly
making the technology available.
It should be useful for web-based apps that want
a most memory resident database (for performance) with HA features to off-set the risks of running a business out of RAM and the potential loss of
transacations.
Hopefully, Sun will release the software freely but that will be the key feature of the announcement.... what OS'es and will the source be posted for tweaking or extensions.
The Clustra SQL support was supposed to be pretty good... the demo was awesome. Especially for real-time applications like phone call processing.
Read the licenses for MP3, AAC and Ogg Vorbis.
Now assume there are hundreds of audio objects out on the internet in these formats.
Someone is paying fees in accordance with the licensing terms you went to check out.
You (indirectly) are supporting those fees.
The average slashdot poster wants files and data
to be free whenever possible. This is one of those instances where they will speak up for the free
file format... It would cost Apple very little to
add this support but they own the music store too
so... can you see a conflict of interest. Sony owns Columbia... We live in a world of conflicting interests...
Ogg Vorbis is engineering effort in the public interest. This is goodness...
Does this help. It will matter over the long run.
Fight the problem now.
Free should be encouraged for all data formats.
Maybe some governments that are not owned by business interests will mandate such standard practices since WE OWN OUR OWN DATA (or should).
MS has us ALL by the short hairs because we gave them our data and paid for the privilege. What
were we thinking ("pretty printouts").
Open Orifice to the rescue.
A FREE way to get your own data back off the MS
reservation.
McD
In the good old days, we booted from system disks and we couldn't even copy them... and we LIKED it."
The world changes and raskin won't... Jobs gets it.
Out perform the competition and delight the user.
Raskin hasn't made a contribution in over 20 years.
Rage on old fart... It was better before... sure.
A friggin' free cellphone has better software than those "good ol days".
McD
Since WMA and ACC are MS and Apple proprietary,
I'd expect the PODcasting phenomena to re-invigorate
MP3 as a common supported format. You can assume cross-platform support w/ MP3 and you can't assume
the same with the MS/Apple wars making life difficult. The content creator with PODcasting will
be millions of wannabee "broadcasters"... Millions.
The backbone routers will feel your pain... the telcos will love the extra usage billing and someone
will need to figure out how to pay for it all.
The suddenly successful POCcaster will find that the ISP has shut their link down do to overuse.
Slashdot a great PODcast and you'll see what I mean. There is no free lunch when you are passing out 40MB downloads and have a few thousand potential listeners...
McD