It seems like the common goal of each of these devices is to keep a person on the corporate campus for as much of their time as possible. This way, the company becomes their life and they feel more of an attachment to the company than a typical 9-5er. It's the hive now instead of a place to work.
The coolness factor to hire in the best minds far outweigh the hive stuff. People can log in from home when a crunch is on, they don't need to be in the hive to work long hours.
There's a need for worker bees too. But rarely is good software delivered without a long hard slog by some queen bees.
The old ladies at my office actually load up Internet Explorer, which loads MSN.com, then use the search field to type www.yahoo.com to get to Yahoo.
They probably just type yahoo.com )or maybe even just yahoo) which would also work. This may be quicker than bringing up a Favorites menu and clicking in there. It's a lot more convenient and what I do in Google with I Feel Lucky for ad hoc site visits.
I'm just curious, coming from the AS/400~iseries world, on the midrange accounting terminology used in the heading of this thread. Is the midrange to describe the size of the company? (which at 400 it does). The scope of accounting functionality needed? Or the size of the computer to run the software, which is the usage of it for the iseries?
If Linux were to be described as a midrange environment, what would be the specs of a midrange class computer running Linux (or other OS'es)? Of course Linux runs in partitions on the iseries and mainframe, but just curious what midrange means elsewhere these days.
from TFA: Are Operating Systems Becoming Irrelevant?...Apple's computers now run Windows through virtualization, thanks to Parallels and VMware. Mainframes, such as IBM's z Series and server farms, allocate their computing resources efficiently and support otherwise incompatible applications and operating systems through virtualization.
How does hosting multiple operating systems in containers make operating systems irrelevant?
An operating system is irrelevant when it is no longer used. The examples above are still using the operating systems, albeit in some cases in places not envisioned by the hosted OS architects.
Most of the projects were in the Alpha stages, if that, and many were just starting up... I just committed heresy here on Slashdot and I'm waiting for the wips and chains.
It does sound nice, I shall try OS/400 at one point if it becomes free software (if only for the persistent space).
It would be nice, maybe some of the concepts will be tried in open software someday.
How does the OS/400 security model work? Is it ACL based? If so (it probably is, as that's the mainstream model) it means that the security failures I mentioned above still exist with it.
The fundamentals of user, group, and role ACL's are there in OS/400. But it does have a very impressive record as far as resisting attacks and viruses, partly due to obscurity, partly due to not having the well known Intel instruction set architecture foils to use (in fact, the hardware is abstracted from the OS by an interface layer), but certainly the object based OS architecture is the real impediment to crackers.
Files, programs, and other mechanisms such as queues and such aren't just called objects, they are strongly typed objects rather than the universal files with different intended purposes found elsewhere. Access just isn't restricted by ACL, what you can do with access to an object is based on its type. One common example is a program isn't a file that can be modified as a file in a file system. And that applies to every object in OS/400, not just executables.
Another big difference is what's called adopted authority. Users are only given authority to execute a high level object, such as certain menu options (a menu is an object in OS/400 like everything else) or startup programs. Then it is the programs that actually have the authority to change data, so a user doesn't have authority to access a program or file directly. Just because they can select a menu option that updates data doesn't mean they could change the data in the file if they could get to it.
Of course root is the big bypass in all the OS'es. One thing OS/400 has is a high granularity of roles going toward root, called QSECOFR in OS/400. So there are Programmer and various Operator and Admin roles to be able to access objects across the board as needed for operations. The root QSECOFR is only used by a few people as needed to maintain the system and data.
In general most any technique to break in to Windows and Unix/Linux doesn't work against OS/400. It would be onerous if the security were there but slowed the system to a crawl, but all this is done with a combination of ACL, typed objects, and adopted authority with fast response for thousands of concurrent users and jobs.
So I don't think the security failures you are suggesting in mainstream ACL models are there in OS/400.
I also have the feeling that programmers get away with badly written, top-heavy software because modern systems are so fast. A lot of the performance is wasted in abstraction layers that in the end offer no possibility for re-use nor improve reliability.
Absolutely, it would be different if there were magnitudes of improvement in software development but there isn't any at all. It seems to be getting worse.
rd
Re:And unlike programmers, you're held accountable
on
Why Software is Hard
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· Score: 1
I'm cuious how you would legally differentiate between code posted up on the web in the public domain, and a multi-million dollar bespoke software project.
by not licensing "as is" and actually taking responsibility for the ensuing results. But I don't think I've ever seen it done.
OS/400 has always done this. The entire memory and disk capacity is a single 64 bit address space addressable by RPG or C++ programs with pointers and pointer math.
OS/400 does away with files, and instead gives each program a 64-bit address space that persists to disk automatically? Wow!
Not the does away with files part. OS/400 has:
- DB2/400 built-in,
- AIX as part of the address space which I understand could run MySQL and other open source databases along with DB2 if we wanted (Linux and/or AIX partitions also can run concurrently with OS/400 in different address spaces),
- a native object based file system
- a Unix style IFS file system
- Apache / Tomcat
- POSIX compliant
but OS/400 was architectured as a flat 64 bit address space across all local storage that all users share, with all accesses to the entire space object based, strongly typed, and authority verified.
Just as important, it does all this for hundreds to thousands of concurrent users with smooth UI response accessing terabytes of data. But it scales all the way down too. Entry level models are priced competitive with other enterprise equipped servers.
As security problems worsen, government would be well served to secure their operations on OS/400, now upgraded as i5/OS on the IBM system i.
rd
Re:Why POOR coding is REWARDED!!!???
on
Why Software is Hard
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If some barrier would have kept CPU speeds below 100Mhz then I imagine that by now people would be developing very efficient code and that we would still have the same level of application performance that we enjoy today with our dual core 2Ghz processors.
Sorry to break this to you, but apps today are not faster than the ones they replaced. We used to write more efficient code, and had more spartan interfaces, because we had to. But I don't think Microsoft Office today is noticably faster than the WordPerfect / Lotus 1-2-3 type apps we wrote in assembler under DOS. All that extra CPU power is more than eaten up by layer upon layer of slower and slower software.
All this allegedly to make programmers more productive. I haven't seen that either.
One program (even worse when it has many threads) that is wanting more memory and more CPU will get the entire User Interface to a halt, even though guaranteeing the required resources for a smooth UI is so cheap.
OS/400 (now i5/OS) handles hundreds of users and thousands of jobs simultaneously with smooth UI response.
Instead, operating systems should just expose one type of memory.
OS/400 has always done this. The entire memory and disk capacity is a single 64 bit address space addressable by RPG or C++ programs with pointers and pointer math.
allows all method calls to transparently run over a network.
OS/400 has XWindows which was cited by poster as too fine grained. Not sure what the answer is here.
a capability-security model should be used..., which is much simpler to use, verify and much more powerful and fine-grained.
OS/400 object based security is very fine grained, simple to administer, and would not make the break in artists of the world very happy were it to be widely used as it should be by those holding critical personal information, such as government agencies, health care companies, and everyone else spilling our personal information via common OS foils.
So if this guy complains that their projects back in the days at salon went bad, I'm not suprised. He's not a coder after all, he was a typical clueless product manager...
He sounded more like a client to me. It was the web content management developers who had the disaster. He just had to pay for it.
rd
Re:Becuase People don't know what they want!
on
Why Software is Hard
·
· Score: 1
Many projects are not the traditional design phase ->building phase. They often overlap, and it's pretty messy.
First time I've seen that viewpoint, and that's probably because it came from the architecture side instead of someone just using architecture as an example of "cookie cutter" construction in comparison to developing software.
rd
Re:Software is hard AND there's lots of incompeten
on
Why Software is Hard
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· Score: 1
Incompetent developers tend to make things more complex than necessary. From that point on, under economic pressure, workarounds are needed to get things done. This in turn makes things even more complex than necessary. THAT is what makes writing software hard.
Well, guess what. Kapor and his team were very competent developers. There was no economic pressure. There were no "workarounds" to meet arbitrary deadlines. And they were trying to do innovative things, so "dumb users who don't know what they want" can't be blamed either.
And still it is hard. None of the so called Insightful responses here so far have the slightest clue. They are typical responses as if no one has RTFA.
I'm not sure I buy that. Maybe I'm just naive, but I don't see a 16 year old kid finding his way into a child porn ring, and then somehow managed to avoid implicating his contacts when he gets investigated.
I agree. I don't think he was involved in any such thing.
Is this likely the result of a bot? I've never heard of a bot posting to a Yahoo Group, and AFAIK you have to register for any Yahoo Group...
I'll take a crack at this. I get new member registration attempts night and day on my web site. When they are successful, they post their web site URL with their member info. The wording varies greatly, but all oriented to tempt someone to click on that link.
Now why do you think they go to all that effort? Because they really, really want people from all over the internet who happen upon on of their spam posts to come and visit for a spell? Nope, nice people have plenty of better things to do than that.
It's because when you click on that link, it's running an exploit kit to own your PC, and ultimately, you.
So these guys, and you can be sure they are guys, spend full time trying to set a trap for you and everyone else. They're hunters and gatherers of suckers. What's your weakness?
Whether it's something forbidden you might be tempted to click on, or an offer of something free, or a link that lures those who might sympthize and want to help, for everyone there are traps from these Chinese, Russians, and others who may even think they are entitled to anything they can steal. They certainly believe Americans are rich and clueless and deserve whatever their stupidity will bear.
You listed all the reasons it's most logical to plant those illicit traps from an owned PC. You use their PC, their identity, you do awful things to lure people even lower than you, and the click doesn't even get what one thought he was getting.
All he gets is owned. Just like the person whose PC was used to do it.
It's a pretty well known fact nowadays that the lion share of people who get caught with child porn on their computers downloaded it off various filesharing networks or traded it with other "collectors".
Some very good points. However, the idealistic scenario of historical child porn being shared via P2P networks and causing no harm is unrealistic. There is a great deal of risk in being involved with child porn, and those "downloads" were to people who had child porn to "upload". In other words, to have some skin in it so to speak, but not entirely their own.
I read of sex offenders being busted fairly frequently, and they almost always were taking pictures of the kids. Just for themselves? One can always argue it, but it's what it takes for them to gain entrance to other "collectors".
I do agree that the child porn clubs weren't selling it, it's not what they're in it for, that's why I included trading.
A family that is still using Windows 98 does not sound like they are serious computer users.
I'm replying to this with my main posting computer, a Windows 98 with Netscape 7. With this, and BlackIce firewall and a modicum of good sense, I haven't had to worry about all that can befall Windows for quite a few years now. I finally had to disable a setting not long ago to keep the WMF exploit from nailing me though.
I also have XP Pro and Firefox for other work, but it's on a lifeline to the mothership for a steady stream of security downloads. And I still don't feel as safe with it as I do with my Windows 98.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like the common goal of each of these devices is to keep a person on the corporate campus for as much of their time as possible. This way, the company becomes their life and they feel more of an attachment to the company than a typical 9-5er. It's the hive now instead of a place to work.
The coolness factor to hire in the best minds far outweigh the hive stuff. People can log in from home when a crunch is on, they don't need to be in the hive to work long hours.
There's a need for worker bees too. But rarely is good software delivered without a long hard slog by some queen bees.
rd
The old ladies at my office actually load up Internet Explorer, which loads MSN.com, then use the search field to type www.yahoo.com to get to Yahoo.
They probably just type yahoo.com )or maybe even just yahoo) which would also work. This may be quicker than bringing up a Favorites menu and clicking in there. It's a lot more convenient and what I do in Google with I Feel Lucky for ad hoc site visits.
rd
Maybe I'm old fashioned but I get to the office, I do my job and after about 8 hours or so I go on my way and do whatever I want to do.
The perks are to attract and retain the best employees for those 8 hours or so.
rd
Ok ya got me. How did you figure this out?
The information given was incorrect. The blog says he (it sounded like a he) was an intern at Microsoft in 2004, 10 years later.
rd
Everyone's too busy showing their ass and having flamewars over stuff instead of working together and learning what the word "compromise" means.
A compromise is a bridge that goes half way across.
rd
Most people who engage in internet flame wars about issues they are particularly passionate about are not autistic.
Plus that wasn't even a flame war. It was damn civilized as far as bitch sessions go.
rd
I'm just curious, coming from the AS/400~iseries world, on the midrange accounting terminology used in the heading of this thread. Is the midrange to describe the size of the company? (which at 400 it does). The scope of accounting functionality needed? Or the size of the computer to run the software, which is the usage of it for the iseries?
If Linux were to be described as a midrange environment, what would be the specs of a midrange class computer running Linux (or other OS'es)? Of course Linux runs in partitions on the iseries and mainframe, but just curious what midrange means elsewhere these days.
rd
from TFA: Are Operating Systems Becoming Irrelevant? ...Apple's computers now run Windows through virtualization, thanks to Parallels and VMware. Mainframes, such as IBM's z Series and server farms, allocate their computing resources efficiently and support otherwise incompatible applications and operating systems through virtualization.
How does hosting multiple operating systems in containers make operating systems irrelevant?
An operating system is irrelevant when it is no longer used. The examples above are still using the operating systems, albeit in some cases in places not envisioned by the hosted OS architects.
rd
Most of the projects were in the Alpha stages, if that, and many were just starting up... I just committed heresy here on Slashdot and I'm waiting for the wips and chains.
You already found the wips.
rd
It does sound nice, I shall try OS/400 at one point if it becomes free software (if only for the persistent space).
It would be nice, maybe some of the concepts will be tried in open software someday.
How does the OS/400 security model work? Is it ACL based? If so (it probably is, as that's the mainstream model) it means that the security failures I mentioned above still exist with it.
The fundamentals of user, group, and role ACL's are there in OS/400. But it does have a very impressive record as far as resisting attacks and viruses, partly due to obscurity, partly due to not having the well known Intel instruction set architecture foils to use (in fact, the hardware is abstracted from the OS by an interface layer), but certainly the object based OS architecture is the real impediment to crackers.
Files, programs, and other mechanisms such as queues and such aren't just called objects, they are strongly typed objects rather than the universal files with different intended purposes found elsewhere. Access just isn't restricted by ACL, what you can do with access to an object is based on its type. One common example is a program isn't a file that can be modified as a file in a file system. And that applies to every object in OS/400, not just executables.
Another big difference is what's called adopted authority. Users are only given authority to execute a high level object, such as certain menu options (a menu is an object in OS/400 like everything else) or startup programs. Then it is the programs that actually have the authority to change data, so a user doesn't have authority to access a program or file directly. Just because they can select a menu option that updates data doesn't mean they could change the data in the file if they could get to it.
Of course root is the big bypass in all the OS'es. One thing OS/400 has is a high granularity of roles going toward root, called QSECOFR in OS/400. So there are Programmer and various Operator and Admin roles to be able to access objects across the board as needed for operations. The root QSECOFR is only used by a few people as needed to maintain the system and data.
In general most any technique to break in to Windows and Unix/Linux doesn't work against OS/400. It would be onerous if the security were there but slowed the system to a crawl, but all this is done with a combination of ACL, typed objects, and adopted authority with fast response for thousands of concurrent users and jobs.
So I don't think the security failures you are suggesting in mainstream ACL models are there in OS/400.
rd
I also have the feeling that programmers get away with badly written, top-heavy software because modern systems are so fast. A lot of the performance is wasted in abstraction layers that in the end offer no possibility for re-use nor improve reliability.
Absolutely, it would be different if there were magnitudes of improvement in software development but there isn't any at all. It seems to be getting worse.
rd
I'm cuious how you would legally differentiate between code posted up on the web in the public domain, and a multi-million dollar bespoke software project.
by not licensing "as is" and actually taking responsibility for the ensuing results. But I don't think I've ever seen it done.
rd
OS/400 has always done this. The entire memory and disk capacity is a single 64 bit address space addressable by RPG or C++ programs with pointers and pointer math.
OS/400 does away with files, and instead gives each program a 64-bit address space that persists to disk automatically? Wow!
Not the does away with files part. OS/400 has:
- DB2/400 built-in,
- AIX as part of the address space which I understand could run MySQL and other open source databases along with DB2 if we wanted (Linux and/or AIX partitions also can run concurrently with OS/400 in different address spaces),
- a native object based file system
- a Unix style IFS file system
- Apache / Tomcat
- POSIX compliant
but OS/400 was architectured as a flat 64 bit address space across all local storage that all users share, with all accesses to the entire space object based, strongly typed, and authority verified.
Just as important, it does all this for hundreds to thousands of concurrent users with smooth UI response accessing terabytes of data. But it scales all the way down too. Entry level models are priced competitive with other enterprise equipped servers.
As security problems worsen, government would be well served to secure their operations on OS/400, now upgraded as i5/OS on the IBM system i.
rd
If some barrier would have kept CPU speeds below 100Mhz then I imagine that by now people would be developing very efficient code and that we would still have the same level of application performance that we enjoy today with our dual core 2Ghz processors.
Sorry to break this to you, but apps today are not faster than the ones they replaced. We used to write more efficient code, and had more spartan interfaces, because we had to. But I don't think Microsoft Office today is noticably faster than the WordPerfect / Lotus 1-2-3 type apps we wrote in assembler under DOS. All that extra CPU power is more than eaten up by layer upon layer of slower and slower software.
All this allegedly to make programmers more productive. I haven't seen that either.
rd
One program (even worse when it has many threads) that is wanting more memory and more CPU will get the entire User Interface to a halt, even though guaranteeing the required resources for a smooth UI is so cheap.
OS/400 (now i5/OS) handles hundreds of users and thousands of jobs simultaneously with smooth UI response.
Instead, operating systems should just expose one type of memory.
OS/400 has always done this. The entire memory and disk capacity is a single 64 bit address space addressable by RPG or C++ programs with pointers and pointer math.
allows all method calls to transparently run over a network.
OS/400 has XWindows which was cited by poster as too fine grained. Not sure what the answer is here.
a capability-security model should be used..., which is much simpler to use, verify and much more powerful and fine-grained.
OS/400 object based security is very fine grained, simple to administer, and would not make the break in artists of the world very happy were it to be widely used as it should be by those holding critical personal information, such as government agencies, health care companies, and everyone else spilling our personal information via common OS foils.
rd
So if this guy complains that their projects back in the days at salon went bad, I'm not suprised. He's not a coder after all, he was a typical clueless product manager...
He sounded more like a client to me. It was the web content management developers who had the disaster. He just had to pay for it.
rd
Many projects are not the traditional design phase ->building phase. They often overlap, and it's pretty messy.
First time I've seen that viewpoint, and that's probably because it came from the architecture side instead of someone just using architecture as an example of "cookie cutter" construction in comparison to developing software.
rd
Incompetent developers tend to make things more complex than necessary. From that point on, under economic pressure, workarounds are needed to get things done. This in turn makes things even more complex than necessary. THAT is what makes writing software hard.
Well, guess what. Kapor and his team were very competent developers. There was no economic pressure. There were no "workarounds" to meet arbitrary deadlines. And they were trying to do innovative things, so "dumb users who don't know what they want" can't be blamed either.
And still it is hard. None of the so called Insightful responses here so far have the slightest clue. They are typical responses as if no one has RTFA.
Oh, wait...
rd
I'm not sure I buy that. Maybe I'm just naive, but I don't see a 16 year old kid finding his way into a child porn ring, and then somehow managed to avoid implicating his contacts when he gets investigated.
I agree. I don't think he was involved in any such thing.
rd
and she was telling me how she had to report her last boyfriend to the police after she found child porn on his PC.
Found, or put?
There's a serious problem with laws that make it easy to lock people away without them even knowing something illegal has occurred.
After talking to her a couple of times, I would definitely say put, and you're right.
rd
Is this likely the result of a bot? I've never heard of a bot posting to a Yahoo Group, and AFAIK you have to register for any Yahoo Group...
I'll take a crack at this. I get new member registration attempts night and day on my web site. When they are successful, they post their web site URL with their member info. The wording varies greatly, but all oriented to tempt someone to click on that link.
Now why do you think they go to all that effort? Because they really, really want people from all over the internet who happen upon on of their spam posts to come and visit for a spell? Nope, nice people have plenty of better things to do than that.
It's because when you click on that link, it's running an exploit kit to own your PC, and ultimately, you.
So these guys, and you can be sure they are guys, spend full time trying to set a trap for you and everyone else. They're hunters and gatherers of suckers. What's your weakness?
Whether it's something forbidden you might be tempted to click on, or an offer of something free, or a link that lures those who might sympthize and want to help, for everyone there are traps from these Chinese, Russians, and others who may even think they are entitled to anything they can steal. They certainly believe Americans are rich and clueless and deserve whatever their stupidity will bear.
You listed all the reasons it's most logical to plant those illicit traps from an owned PC. You use their PC, their identity, you do awful things to lure people even lower than you, and the click doesn't even get what one thought he was getting.
All he gets is owned. Just like the person whose PC was used to do it.
rd
It's a pretty well known fact nowadays that the lion share of people who get caught with child porn on their computers downloaded it off various filesharing networks or traded it with other "collectors".
Some very good points. However, the idealistic scenario of historical child porn being shared via P2P networks and causing no harm is unrealistic. There is a great deal of risk in being involved with child porn, and those "downloads" were to people who had child porn to "upload". In other words, to have some skin in it so to speak, but not entirely their own.
I read of sex offenders being busted fairly frequently, and they almost always were taking pictures of the kids. Just for themselves? One can always argue it, but it's what it takes for them to gain entrance to other "collectors".
I do agree that the child porn clubs weren't selling it, it's not what they're in it for, that's why I included trading.
rd
A family that is still using Windows 98 does not sound like they are serious computer users.
I'm replying to this with my main posting computer, a Windows 98 with Netscape 7. With this, and BlackIce firewall and a modicum of good sense, I haven't had to worry about all that can befall Windows for quite a few years now. I finally had to disable a setting not long ago to keep the WMF exploit from nailing me though.
I also have XP Pro and Firefox for other work, but it's on a lifeline to the mothership for a steady stream of security downloads. And I still don't feel as safe with it as I do with my Windows 98.
rd
Not all spyware comes from piracy, not all "free" things come from piracy.
That's true, but I don't think I used the term spyware. And regardless of what really ends up being free, the lures of thieves are hidden among them.
rd
If I recall right originally she wanted to be a actor but when he was murdered she switched her major to law.
:)
I think it was English teacher. Now she does some acting from time to time.
rd