Each "choice domain" is going to have varying characteristics that will make a decision process easy or difficult. These car and meat examples happen to be ones where the information available and past experience, not to mention the driving purpose of the purchase (no pun intended) such as wanting an off-roading vehicle versus a commute vehicle or throwing a BBQ versus gourmet dinner, will undoubtedly make the decision process easier.
Getting back to computers, let's take web browsers for example. There are several web browsers in existance today, each varying by several characteristics:
-support for web standards -support for tabbed browsing -support for skins -anti-aliased text -intuitive bookmark management -support for ad blocking -support for pop-up blocking -support for extentions and plug-ins
How many browsers does Windows come with by default? One. How many browsers does Mac OS X come with by default? One.
How many browsers do I have on my Windows machine at work? Two. How many browsers do I have on my Mac OS X machine at home? Four.
Just because only one choice is available initially doesn't mean it's a static situation. These systems are set up so that out of the box, the user isn't required to make a choice. There is an inherent trust that is assumed that when you buy one of these systems, the manufacturer has set up the system in a way that will be adequate for your needs. It is also assumed that those whose needs are not met will seek out ways to meet those needs, i.e. via looking for alternatives or developing their own.
"Freedom to choose" doesn't have to mean "forced to choose".
You might argue that with Linux systems, having multiple word processing suites pre-loaded and available in the menus, for example, might make the decision process easier. However, by doing that, you're immediately forcing a decision on the user that they might not be ready to make without a better understanding of their personal needs and what each suite offers. The former can only come with experience. The latter can be addressed by providing the user with enough information to be able to make an informed decision and the means to act on their decision (e.g. a web site, package management system, etc.).
Presenting decision-making information is an artform in itself, as there are so many factors that are involved. For example, what's the best format to present the information (text, stylized text, graphics, multi-media), which information should be presented (will anyone care about feature a, will anyone be offended by mentioning feature b, will feature c be attractive enough to plunk down x dollars), and how/when should it be presented (printed documentation, online documentation, set-up wizard, tool tips, demo software, in-person demo, magazine articles, etc.)
I think this is where the real challenge (and potential pay-off) lies... in shaping the decision making process of others. Of course, this applies to more than just computers. We all do this on a daily basis, and the media, governments and corporations are all just extensions of ourselves. When put in a position to shape the decision making process of others, our different goals and motivations will also have an effect on what options are presented... sometimes so much so that the options presented are not necessarily the best for the decision maker, whether they know it or not (I like to call this the "illusion of choice").
For example, consider the cola wars. Coke vs. Pepsi: Which is better? The question is framed with the implied assumption: you want a cola and nothing else will do. No alternatives are even considered. Perhaps a glass of cold water would be just as refreshing and much more healthy but is never suggested as an option because it was previously thought it was difficult to make a profit selling water... until it was bottled, a brand identity building and marketting team was be put behind it, and
...said Sass Peress, CEO of ICP Solar Technologies, which licensed the solar system from GSE Technologies and is partnering with ScotteVest to create the solar jackets.
Who do I contact if I want to license the rest of the universe?
Maybe one way to reduce the amount of work the end user needs to do would be to have the computer provide the user with a list of keyword candidates (assuming the file were a text file... images would still need to have text entry boxes). An algorithm would try to determine what good keyword candidates would be; perhaps proper nouns and frequently used words (excluding common words like "the", "of", and "and"). The user could then just click on the appropriate words, with the option to add more themselves.
It would be nice if the system could do the keyword candidate list creation in the background during idle times, but I don't think that would be possible without total application integration. The keyword determination step would probably need to happen only when the Save command was issued. The process would need to be fast enough that it wouldn't become more of an annoyance than a useful tool, though.
First of all, someone mentioned above that "we all know that most laptop thefts are not by criminals that want data". While I have not seen any statistics one way or another, I think the different components of a laptop are worth more to different people. To a basic consumer, the hardware itself is probably worth more than their vast archive of Britney Spears mp3s (you're not ashamed, are you?). However, from a corporate or government perspective, intellectual property or intelligence is worth orders of magnitude more than the actual hardware cost. The hardware value is going to decrease over time anyway, but information in the wrong hands can put a company out of business or allow other nations to build nuclear weapons that much more readily.
Secondly, it is possible to have tokens with some intelligence (unlike RFID cards) yet don't require an internal power source. There are a number of companies that have developed contactless smart cards that might prove useful for this project:
Granted, these products don't have much more range than 10cm and a smart card is not necessarily a form factor that is best for this application, but the technology does exist. It would seem the iPaq and 802.11 connection they use for their research is good enough for proof-of-concept.
Thirdly, for people who have mentioned Scramdisk and DriveCrypt, did you even read the research paper? They aren't worried so much about encrypting the whole filesystem. That's been done before (with the products mentioned, plus CFS and MS's EFS). They're more concerned about the files that may be in the disk cache. Also, it's not the encryption process that's the annoyance for the user, it's the decryption process. Sure, you can easily lock the screen with a swift keystroke. But usually you're required to type your password in every time you want to decrypt. This "token" that they refer to could be considered like an agent in the ssh world, or doing a kinit in the Kerberos world. You authenticate to the token once, then it does the strong authentication for the decryption for you for a fixed period of time.
Oh, and the lost token concern? That's what key escrow is for and could potentially be considered outside the scope of this research. If data recovery is a concern, organizations can store a backup of the key (securily of course!) that can be used to decrypt the data without requiring the token (i.e. pull the drive and read the data with speciallized software). Key escrow is common practice at many organizations. However, an escrowed encryption key should NOT be used for data signing as non-repudiation becomes much more difficult to prove. Besides, the authentication method and encryption method should be sufficiently separated so that in the event that one of the keys is compromised, the other component is not affected.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is building her own high-end system. She was interested in purchasing a dual P4 Xeon motherboard and googlegear.com was one of the only online merchants selling one.
She said the prices were very reasonable and shipping was super fast. I've never done business with them myself, so I can't vouch for them personally, but my friend's review was glowing.
I was recently in the market for the 48GB IBM Travelstar notebook harddrive. I already purchased the drive from another vendor, but now looking at googlegear.com I see I could have saved $30. It's the cheapest price I've seen yet (newegg.com doesn't even list it).
BTW, I don't believe they are affiliated with our favorite search engine google.com.
Like a previous poster mentioned above, this isn't necessarily any better (or worse) for the package consumer. This is better for the package creator. To quote chabotc:
You only need to write the 'build and package tool' implimentation once (a so called.spec file). This 'source package' you can then compile on each different architecture and platform.
(resulting in a binary usable for only that platform).
This makes cross-platform/architecture distribution a lot easier, and a lot easier to maintain.
Very true. But who wants to be in the group that's going to be burned by our poor judgement when using this new technology? Ask the millions of Japanese citizens that died in WWII from our nukes and the hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries diagnosed with cancer due to our testing of so-called depleted uranium weapons if their sacrifice was/is worth it. Woo hoo. Now we've got "clean" energy plants that produce toxic waste that we can bury in our neighbor's yards.
I know, I know, this sounds a lot like a Don Henley song, but excuse me, I'll pass thankyouverymuch. It's easy to say "Oh, we'll make mistakes. People will die." It's unfortunate that 1) this is true and 2) we even take this attitude. Certainly there are ways to avoid these doomsday scenarios. But this requires people thinking about the situation first, then acting. Quickly. These are hard problems that demand quite a bit from the general population, but nonetheless have to be addressed. If our history is any indication of the future, someone else will do the acting before the thinking. That's all that Katz is trying to say.
It would seem that a lot of Slashdot readers don't care of Katz's writing...think it's too sensationalistic. Ya know folks, he's just playing the Devil's advocate. He's trying to get us to think about our frickin' world so that we might take part in it someday more than hooking up X10 modules to our lamps and coffee maker. There are people in the world that know far less about technology than us (and don't care) but have enough power to have a major impact on the course of the human race, both in good and bad ways. If we can't find our way into those kinds of positions, we should at least find a way to clue them into doing the Right Thing with our research/code/hardware.
Okay. I'm a little verklempt. I'll give you a topic. "Third world nation with a hatred for the US gets a hold of genome map and develops a virulent biological weapon. Discretely brought into the country, a distributed attack is made in every major metropolitan area in the US." Next summer's blockbuster or current event in the year 2010? Discuss.
Slashdot Mirror
These sound like poor analogies and FUD, to me.
Each "choice domain" is going to have varying characteristics that will make a decision process easy or difficult. These car and meat examples happen to be ones where the information available and past experience, not to mention the driving purpose of the purchase (no pun intended) such as wanting an off-roading vehicle versus a commute vehicle or throwing a BBQ versus gourmet dinner, will undoubtedly make the decision process easier.
Getting back to computers, let's take web browsers for example. There are several web browsers in existance today, each varying by several characteristics:
-support for web standards
-support for tabbed browsing
-support for skins
-anti-aliased text
-intuitive bookmark management
-support for ad blocking
-support for pop-up blocking
-support for extentions and plug-ins
How many browsers does Windows come with by default? One.
How many browsers does Mac OS X come with by default? One.
How many browsers do I have on my Windows machine at work? Two.
How many browsers do I have on my Mac OS X machine at home? Four.
Just because only one choice is available initially doesn't mean it's a static situation. These systems are set up so that out of the box, the user isn't required to make a choice. There is an inherent trust that is assumed that when you buy one of these systems, the manufacturer has set up the system in a way that will be adequate for your needs. It is also assumed that those whose needs are not met will seek out ways to meet those needs, i.e. via looking for alternatives or developing their own.
"Freedom to choose" doesn't have to mean "forced to choose".
You might argue that with Linux systems, having multiple word processing suites pre-loaded and available in the menus, for example, might make the decision process easier. However, by doing that, you're immediately forcing a decision on the user that they might not be ready to make without a better understanding of their personal needs and what each suite offers. The former can only come with experience. The latter can be addressed by providing the user with enough information to be able to make an informed decision and the means to act on their decision (e.g. a web site, package management system, etc.).
Presenting decision-making information is an artform in itself, as there are so many factors that are involved. For example, what's the best format to present the information (text, stylized text, graphics, multi-media), which information should be presented (will anyone care about feature a, will anyone be offended by mentioning feature b, will feature c be attractive enough to plunk down x dollars), and how/when should it be presented (printed documentation, online documentation, set-up wizard, tool tips, demo software, in-person demo, magazine articles, etc.)
I think this is where the real challenge (and potential pay-off) lies... in shaping the decision making process of others. Of course, this applies to more than just computers. We all do this on a daily basis, and the media, governments and corporations are all just extensions of ourselves. When put in a position to shape the decision making process of others, our different goals and motivations will also have an effect on what options are presented... sometimes so much so that the options presented are not necessarily the best for the decision maker, whether they know it or not (I like to call this the "illusion of choice").
For example, consider the cola wars. Coke vs. Pepsi: Which is better? The question is framed with the implied assumption: you want a cola and nothing else will do. No alternatives are even considered. Perhaps a glass of cold water would be just as refreshing and much more healthy but is never suggested as an option because it was previously thought it was difficult to make a profit selling water... until it was bottled, a brand identity building and marketting team was be put behind it, and
From the article:
...said Sass Peress, CEO of ICP Solar Technologies, which licensed the solar system from GSE Technologies and is partnering with ScotteVest to create the solar jackets.
Who do I contact if I want to license the rest of the universe?
A "news that doesn't require discussion" section with comments disabled.
You watch a lot of television, don't you?
Maybe one way to reduce the amount of work the end user needs to do would be to have the computer provide the user with a list of keyword candidates (assuming the file were a text file... images would still need to have text entry boxes). An algorithm would try to determine what good keyword candidates would be; perhaps proper nouns and frequently used words (excluding common words like "the", "of", and "and"). The user could then just click on the appropriate words, with the option to add more themselves.
It would be nice if the system could do the keyword candidate list creation in the background during idle times, but I don't think that would be possible without total application integration. The keyword determination step would probably need to happen only when the Save command was issued. The process would need to be fast enough that it wouldn't become more of an annoyance than a useful tool, though.
First of all, someone mentioned above that "we all know that most laptop thefts are not by criminals that want data". While I have not seen any statistics one way or another, I think the different components of a laptop are worth more to different people. To a basic consumer, the hardware itself is probably worth more than their vast archive of Britney Spears mp3s (you're not ashamed, are you?). However, from a corporate or government perspective, intellectual property or intelligence is worth orders of magnitude more than the actual hardware cost. The hardware value is going to decrease over time anyway, but information in the wrong hands can put a company out of business or allow other nations to build nuclear weapons that much more readily.
Secondly, it is possible to have tokens with some intelligence (unlike RFID cards) yet don't require an internal power source. There are a number of companies that have developed contactless smart cards that might prove useful for this project:
FARGO
HID Corp.
Inside Contactless
Granted, these products don't have much more range than 10cm and a smart card is not necessarily a form factor that is best for this application, but the technology does exist. It would seem the iPaq and 802.11 connection they use for their research is good enough for proof-of-concept.
Thirdly, for people who have mentioned Scramdisk and DriveCrypt, did you even read the research paper? They aren't worried so much about encrypting the whole filesystem. That's been done before (with the products mentioned, plus CFS and MS's EFS). They're more concerned about the files that may be in the disk cache. Also, it's not the encryption process that's the annoyance for the user, it's the decryption process. Sure, you can easily lock the screen with a swift keystroke. But usually you're required to type your password in every time you want to decrypt. This "token" that they refer to could be considered like an agent in the ssh world, or doing a kinit in the Kerberos world. You authenticate to the token once, then it does the strong authentication for the decryption for you for a fixed period of time.
Oh, and the lost token concern? That's what key escrow is for and could potentially be considered outside the scope of this research. If data recovery is a concern, organizations can store a backup of the key (securily of course!) that can be used to decrypt the data without requiring the token (i.e. pull the drive and read the data with speciallized software). Key escrow is common practice at many organizations. However, an escrowed encryption key should NOT be used for data signing as non-repudiation becomes much more difficult to prove. Besides, the authentication method and encryption method should be sufficiently separated so that in the event that one of the keys is compromised, the other component is not affected.
I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is building her own high-end system. She was interested in purchasing a dual P4 Xeon motherboard and googlegear.com was one of the only online merchants selling one.
She said the prices were very reasonable and shipping was super fast. I've never done business with them myself, so I can't vouch for them personally, but my friend's review was glowing.
I was recently in the market for the 48GB IBM Travelstar notebook harddrive. I already purchased the drive from another vendor, but now looking at googlegear.com I see I could have saved $30. It's the cheapest price I've seen yet (newegg.com doesn't even list it).
BTW, I don't believe they are affiliated with our favorite search engine google.com.
I know, I know, this sounds a lot like a Don Henley song, but excuse me, I'll pass thankyouverymuch. It's easy to say "Oh, we'll make mistakes. People will die." It's unfortunate that 1) this is true and 2) we even take this attitude. Certainly there are ways to avoid these doomsday scenarios. But this requires people thinking about the situation first, then acting. Quickly. These are hard problems that demand quite a bit from the general population, but nonetheless have to be addressed. If our history is any indication of the future, someone else will do the acting before the thinking. That's all that Katz is trying to say.
It would seem that a lot of Slashdot readers don't care of Katz's writing...think it's too sensationalistic. Ya know folks, he's just playing the Devil's advocate. He's trying to get us to think about our frickin' world so that we might take part in it someday more than hooking up X10 modules to our lamps and coffee maker. There are people in the world that know far less about technology than us (and don't care) but have enough power to have a major impact on the course of the human race, both in good and bad ways. If we can't find our way into those kinds of positions, we should at least find a way to clue them into doing the Right Thing with our research/code/hardware.
Okay. I'm a little verklempt. I'll give you a topic. "Third world nation with a hatred for the US gets a hold of genome map and develops a virulent biological weapon. Discretely brought into the country, a distributed attack is made in every major metropolitan area in the US." Next summer's blockbuster or current event in the year 2010? Discuss.