The problem I see with Dijkstra's statement is that he says (as I understand it) that poor mathematicans would do better pure mathematicans than they they would do programmers.
Perhaps he meant something along the lines of "if you're a poor mathematician, don't compound your poor choice of career by becoming a programmer instead, because programming is still math." I don't think he meant that pure mathematics is the easier course of study, only that programming isn't necessarilly easier either.
You know, this says something about the Thai government that they claim their reason for the curfew is "children play too many games", and then basically restrict everyone's access. Kinda sounds like they consider all citizens to be children. Typical military dictatorship nonsense.
For a responsible parent governed by a democracy, your language is too violent. something wrong with either you, or your government. Hypocrisy, maybe.
Sorry troll, but language on its own hardly rises to the level of "too violent". Bashing in heads with a baseball bat? Yes, that'd be "too violent". Using profanity to express one's vehement disagreement with dictatorial government? That's hardly even revolutionary.
most Easterners are peace loving, and wouldn't resort to violence or guns despite rising costs, unemployment etc.
Most westerners don't resort to violence either. This is a characteristic of people, not cultures. Most people don't want to hurt others.
I was once amazed at the depth of knowledge exhibited by Slashdotters on an article on MP3 on rifle magazines - so many seemed to know about guns, rifles, magazines, pitch, bore, etc.. it was a scary thought.
What are you talking about? There are firearms enthusiasts in every country in the world. Did you know they have guns in Thailand too? Did you know that asians are sometimes violent as well [cough]Pol Pot[cough]? Holding up your unrealisticly idealized version of "eastern culture" as superior is absurd.
Why, every day in the US, there's some kind of revolt against Asians robbing 'intelligent' jobs from the West.
What are you talking about? There's no "revolt" against asians here! There are complaints from whiny unemployed tech monkeys on occasion, but for the most part immigrants are welcome here. The US is a country populated almost entirely by immigrants and descendants of immigrants. I suspect a european trying to find work in (say) Japan would have a lot more trouble than an asian trying to find work in the US.
Freedom is good in the hands of those who respect and value it - censorship tends to move people towards alternate avenues for enjoyment - and these are normally much better.
Who decides which of the "avenues of enjoyment" are to be censored? And on what criteria to you base your unilateral declaration that the uncensored options are "normally much better"? Your arguments make sense assuming you have a perfect, enlightened dictator guiding you. But such a creature doesn't exist. You say "Freedom is good in the hands of those who respect and value it", but then go off the track and talk about the value of censorship, which is a restriction of freedom. Are you saying that having freedom curtailed makes one respect and value it more? Your points don't make sense. Pardon the cliche, but they reek of Orwellian double-speak: "censorship ensures freedom!", "Ignorance is safety!", "debate is violence!"
A man named +ORC published a tutorial on how to reverse engineer a Windows program called pooldemo.exe. From this text, an era was born.
Heh. I remember those days. I already knew most of the R-E techniques +ORC expounded upon, but I did find his recipe for the martini-vodka most refreshing.
One would think that his time is more valuably spent running important medical institutions, searching for new cancer insights/cures, etc
As if people reading Slashdot had a right to criticize anyone else about not working.:)
Heh. Yeah, this is yet another case of the old/. armchair-philanthropism. Whenever a story pops up wher some guy builds, say, an Atari 2600 emulator made of Legos, there's always a bunch of holier-than-thou jackasses who wonder aloud why the guy is wasting his time doing that when he could be "volunteering to teach children to read", or "helping build low-cost housing". What's the problem with those types? I personally think it's poorly-disguised self loathing. They haven't lifted so much as a finger to help anyone for years, so they criticize others for it. Sick bastards. Can't a guy go to a movie once in a while? Or does he have to sit in front of a Viro-Matic Analyzer all day just to please them?
but we're not fighting laws here. We're fighting money.
What? Who modded that "insightful"? It doesn't make any sense. We're not "fighting money". The problem is that there is an organization (RIAA) that is using its money to buy law. The money isn't the problem-- the law is!
"A method for translating instant messages exchanged between two or more devices over a network by one or more users that communicate in different languages, the method comprising: establishing a user profile indicating at least one user language and one or more translation preferences of the one or more users; receiving a message as input composed by at least one of the users according to the user language; translating the message from the user language to at least one different language corresponding to the one or more translation preferences; and transmitting the message in translated form to at least one of the two or more devices. "
Shouldn't this patent have been refused under the "non-obvious" rule? Sure, it's a subjective thing, but come on. The "specifics" of the patent are just a laundry list of all the usual features one adds when computerizing anything. User profile with translation prefs? More than obvious. Any software that doesn't save my prefs is lame. Translation by computer? Obvious. People have been making computers translate for decades. IMing? Already exists. The "client-server-client" part is part of most IM systems already, so that's nothing new. Putting the translation system in the middle on the server? Fails the obvious test as well. Really, I fail to see how this is anything more than the usual patenting of "doing commonly known task-- with a computer!" or, the second most popular, patenting two common tasks trivially combined, e.g. "reading a book while riding a unicycle!" What a load of crap.
Thing I never understood about modern computer keyboards is the staggered layout of the rows -- presumably a throwback from old typewriter days
That's exactly it. Each key was actually on the end of a long mechanical lever and those levers couldn't be right on top of one another; hence the slight staggering of the keys.
Then, how do you explain the fact that QWERTY is still very unbalanced?
Sholes wasn't trying to create a balanced keyboard as far as finger-usage. He was only trying to alleviate the mechanical problems with the hammer bars jamming.
What he meant was that it is meant to slow down the typing of common letter combinations.
If that's wht he meant, he's still wrong. It wasn't meant to slow anything down. QWERTY was meant to put the HAMMER BARS on the Sholes typewriter farther apart for common digraphs in order to reduce the likelyhood of jams. That's all.
'er' and 'ty' being pretty common...
You obviously don't know how the original Sholes typewriter worked. The 'E' and 'R' hammer bars weren't next to each other. In fact, there is another aspect of the qwerty layout that hearkens back to the Sholes typewriter, and it shows how the bars were laid out. Look at your keyboard. Notice how the rows are slightly staggered, with the 'Q' a little to the left of the 'A'? On the Sholes typewriter the letter keys were on the end of long levers and (since two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time) those levers have to be offset slightly. If you take a ruler and set it vertically next to the '1' key, then slide it to the right and note order each key crosses the edge of the ruler you get the order of the hammer bars on the original typewriter (sort of-- there was no '1' or '0' on the original). Try it. I bet you get "qa2zws3xed4crf5vtg6byh7nuj8mik9,ol0.p;". Notice how ER and TY aren't next to one another?
Yet another article passing off oft-told mythology as historical fact. The author writes that "QWERTY was originally designed by Christopher Sholes to slow typing down." This is absolutely incorrect. Sholes designed the QWERTY layout to allow faster typing. As the author explains without actually thinking about it:
"One of the kinks in the machine was key jamming... If a typist typed two letters one after the other too quickly, the "hammers" would hit each other... So, Sholes came up with a keyboard layout that would place letters which would be most likely struck closely in succession on opposite sides of the layout."
OK, so how does placing common digraphs at opposite ends of the keyboard "slow typing down"? That's right, it doesn't, as it only required the typist to learn a new key layout. What it does do is reduce the possibility of the hammers colliding and jamming. On an original Sholes typewriter, if you want to hit two letters whose hammers are right next to one another, you have to wait until the first letter is almost all the way back in the resting position before you hit the next letter if you want to avoid a jam. Two letters with hammers at opposite ends, though-- the first letter need only fall back a fraction of the distance before it's out of the path of the next letter. He came up with an elegant solution to an unforseen problem.
I wish people would stop villifying Sholes with the "he did it to slow us down" story.
One nice thing about the mda cards was that they used a different address for the video memory so they would co-exist with your cga/ega/mcga/vga. Two monitors for graphics dev! One for the graphics, and a mono-text mda monitor for debug output.
Heh. I still use a hercules mono board with an amber monitor to debug using SoftIce. I understand one can use dual VGAs now, but that just doesn't seem right...
Now as far as home wirering why would you ever be terminating to rj45 ends?
You raise a very good point. Anyone who's installing network wiring should use a patch panel and patch cables. Just crimping connectors on the ends of that cat5 solid wire is asking for trouble. Connecterized ends just make a big spaghetti mess, the tabs break off, and frequently the connectors don't crimp on solidly and you get infuriating intermittant connection loss. Take it from an installer (me): use a patch panel
Remember way back when, when Apple donated a bunch of Macs to the schools? Yeah, then the parents all bought Macs for compatibility and because their kids knew how to use them.
Heh, yeah, I remember those days. All the kids would say "c'mon Dad, buy a Mac" and Dad would say "What the hell's a Mac? I'm buying an IBM like we use a work".
You raise a crucial point. I think it's important to remember that kids don't have money. And, although Linux, OO, etc. are all free, the hardware they run on isn't. So long as you have parents buying the hardware, it's gonna come with all the usual MS crap pre-installed.
My personal opinion is that treating commercial speech differently from noncommercial speech is unconstitutional.
It's not.
if a company lies about what their product can do, that is a breech[sic] of contract
This is why it's not. It's essentially illegal for a company to make false claims regarding its products for the same reason it's illegal to libel or slander someone. Freedom of speech has all sorts of reasonable limits. The reason commercial speech isn't as "protected" as (say) political speech is fairly obvious.
That has little (if anything) to do with their numbers. DirecTV service with all the stop pulled out (all the movie and sports networks, etc. etc.) runs up to $85.99/month, or $1,031.88/year. They can get their $1,000/(year*thief) number without even having to consider pay-per-view.
Not all businesses operate like the RIAA members.
You're right. I remembered a huge damage claim based on multiple PPV charges, but now that I think about it, it was a cable TV company vs. people who had illicit descamblers.
Then you shouldn't mind spammers. After all, you would be paying for that electricity and ISP service anyway...
It doesn't take any extra electricity if I descramble DTV's signal. The signal was already there. Bad comparison.
If you can't view more than just one channel during the course of a month, it's time for you to get a new TV.
Actually, what I meant by "more than one channel at the same time" is literallymore than one channel at the same time. To wit, how can they calculate damages based on the price of a pay-per-view movie that's running every 2 hours, on five channels, start time offset by 20 minutes on each channel? OK, so the 10am showing of "AI" was descrambled. Is it reasonable to charge damages for cost of the 10:20AM showing also? And how about other PPV shows running concurrently? Is it reasonable to get damages for three different PPV events which all start at 10AM and end at noon? Sure, one could order all three, but no one ever would! The basis of their loss calculation is unreal. I think that they should have to show actual damages in order to recover damages. Fines are one thing, but damages based on unlikely or impossible alternate scenarios ("if they'd ordered every PPV, on every channel, all day") are absurd. The law may allow such pie-in-the-sky fantasy damage estimates, but in a reasonable legal system it shouldn't. I won't even go into the fact they haven't actually lost anything...
The true irony is this slashdot story linking an article about the misuse of the word "irony" and all the comments from people misusing the word irony...
" An estimated 3 million people illegally watch satellite television using devices that unscramble satellite TV signals. The industry estimates it loses $4 billion a year in revenue."
Is that right? Satellite TV costs well over $1000 a year? No wonder people don't want to pay for it.
Weasel maths, I'm guessing.
Indeed. The $4Billion they calculate is based on what it would cost those 3 million people to subscribe to every single channel available, which is what those people are supposedly watching. At least they're not adding in what it would cost to purchase every single pay-per-view (even the ones running concurrently), like they do when asking for damages in court. Nice logical rationale: "if we don't know what they watched, we must assume they watched everything-- at the same time"
So why don't we just create a long 50000-bit key and slap it onto a magnetic-swipe card?
A huge key is unnecessary. If they have the card, they have the key. The key exists solely to keep someone from whipping up a card with your user ID and getting instant access. No one is going to guess your key even if it's only 128 bits.
That way, the system is only comprised when:
a) You lose the card
b) Someone threatens you at knife-point to hand the card over.
Seeing that we already have the system you describe above (sans ridiculously large key) in use for ATMs, one has to look at the purpose of biometric authentication. Yeah, that's right: with biometric you can't easily a) lose the "key", and b) no one can easily take it from you at knifepoint.
If the army mandated a free operating system, they could modify the operating system to only provide the services that the army NEEDs
Modified by whom? Certified for DoD use by whom? As for "services...the army needs", even the army can't tell you that, so they'd say "just make it do everything". Also, who's going to port all the lame crap software the army already has that runs under windows? What if some of it can't be ported?
The problems you described do not happen with a properly configured system.
People don't forget passwords or forget which printer is theirs in Linux? [scoff!]
I would guess even someone in B. CO 1/509th Abn could figure out.
Figure out isn't the problem. You say Linux can be made unbreakable. Nobody who's ever given anything to an 11B (infantryman) ever calls anything unbreakable. You can't depend upon something being robust to protect it, you have to have people available who can fix it when it breaks.
No offence intended.
None taken. Hooah.
SGT DunMalg
3/187th MI Bde
101st ABN Div (Air Assault)
(1987-1993)
Wait a minute... they just agreed to purchase half a billion dollars worth of software and you're saying they can't afford to hire people to oversee the customization and support they might need with something like Linux? For probably a lot less than half a billion dollars they could hire Linus himself and probably have more than enough left over to hire Alan Cox, RMS, and pretty much whomever else they please.
You've obviously never worked on a military contracted project. They can't just go out and "hire Linus himself", or even say who they want to hire. They have to get all kinds of competitive bids and make sure the bidding companies have jumped through all the right hoops to be eligible. And no, they can't just form their own little software development house, either. The army tries to contract out for everything that doesn't directly support its job: land warfare. Mess hall cooks are mostly civilian now, even.
If you have your own IT department custom rolling Linux distributions for you, you are going to get things that just work and are easy to use.
Yeah? How long will it take to debug it? How long will it take to get this custom-made Linux certified for DoD use? What is your definition of "easy to use"? Easiest of all to use is the most annoyingly ubiquitous commercial OS and Office apps, which most people already know how to use before they join. Who's gonna teach thoswe dopes in the finance corps how to use this custom OS? Who do they call when something doesn't work? Linus himself? Will the army really want to pay for its own in-house OS tech support? Where will they find enough people to man the phones who know how this particular custom-built version of Linux works?
The iRobots that debuted in Afghanistan ran Linux and I don't think anybody complained about needing to anti-alias fonts or that they were too hard to use. In fact, the soldiers had a very easy time learning to use them and found them to be invaluable.
Bad comparison, man. iRobot's use of Linux is an embedded application. The army uses a non-windows based operating system for the Stinger-RMP SAM. Who cares? It's embedded. It not relevant.
The point is, the military has successfully used Linux, they did get excellent support from a vendor, and they certainly didn't pay half a billion dollars for it.
We're talking desktop computers, not limited-purpose field deployed systems. They're getting support for the iRobot-builtn PackBot, not Linux. The fact that the PackBot runs a customized Linux is totally irrelevant. They also didn't order a PackBot for every desktop computer, so saying it didn't cost.5 billion dollars is irrelevant as well.
I'd like to see the military move towards non-microsoft software, sure. But saying "for half a billion they coulda' rolled their own" is an uninformed handwave at the realities of getting anything deployed in the military.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps he meant something along the lines of "if you're a poor mathematician, don't compound your poor choice of career by becoming a programmer instead, because programming is still math." I don't think he meant that pure mathematics is the easier course of study, only that programming isn't necessarilly easier either.
You know, this says something about the Thai government that they claim their reason for the curfew is "children play too many games", and then basically restrict everyone's access. Kinda sounds like they consider all citizens to be children. Typical military dictatorship nonsense.
Painfully bad, isn't it? :)
Sorry troll, but language on its own hardly rises to the level of "too violent". Bashing in heads with a baseball bat? Yes, that'd be "too violent". Using profanity to express one's vehement disagreement with dictatorial government? That's hardly even revolutionary.
most Easterners are peace loving, and wouldn't resort to violence or guns despite rising costs, unemployment etc.
Most westerners don't resort to violence either. This is a characteristic of people, not cultures. Most people don't want to hurt others.
I was once amazed at the depth of knowledge exhibited by Slashdotters on an article on MP3 on rifle magazines - so many seemed to know about guns, rifles, magazines, pitch, bore, etc.. it was a scary thought.
What are you talking about? There are firearms enthusiasts in every country in the world. Did you know they have guns in Thailand too? Did you know that asians are sometimes violent as well [cough]Pol Pot[cough]? Holding up your unrealisticly idealized version of "eastern culture" as superior is absurd.
Why, every day in the US, there's some kind of revolt against Asians robbing 'intelligent' jobs from the West.
What are you talking about? There's no "revolt" against asians here! There are complaints from whiny unemployed tech monkeys on occasion, but for the most part immigrants are welcome here. The US is a country populated almost entirely by immigrants and descendants of immigrants. I suspect a european trying to find work in (say) Japan would have a lot more trouble than an asian trying to find work in the US.
Freedom is good in the hands of those who respect and value it - censorship tends to move people towards alternate avenues for enjoyment - and these are normally much better.
Who decides which of the "avenues of enjoyment" are to be censored? And on what criteria to you base your unilateral declaration that the uncensored options are "normally much better"? Your arguments make sense assuming you have a perfect, enlightened dictator guiding you. But such a creature doesn't exist. You say "Freedom is good in the hands of those who respect and value it", but then go off the track and talk about the value of censorship, which is a restriction of freedom. Are you saying that having freedom curtailed makes one respect and value it more? Your points don't make sense. Pardon the cliche, but they reek of Orwellian double-speak: "censorship ensures freedom!", "Ignorance is safety!", "debate is violence!"
Heh. I remember those days. I already knew most of the R-E techniques +ORC expounded upon, but I did find his recipe for the martini-vodka most refreshing.
As if people reading Slashdot had a right to criticize anyone else about not working. :)
Heh. Yeah, this is yet another case of the old /. armchair-philanthropism. Whenever a story pops up wher some guy builds, say, an Atari 2600 emulator made of Legos, there's always a bunch of holier-than-thou jackasses who wonder aloud why the guy is wasting his time doing that when he could be "volunteering to teach children to read", or "helping build low-cost housing". What's the problem with those types? I personally think it's poorly-disguised self loathing. They haven't lifted so much as a finger to help anyone for years, so they criticize others for it. Sick bastards. Can't a guy go to a movie once in a while? Or does he have to sit in front of a Viro-Matic Analyzer all day just to please them?
What? Who modded that "insightful"? It doesn't make any sense. We're not "fighting money". The problem is that there is an organization (RIAA) that is using its money to buy law. The money isn't the problem-- the law is!
I thought you were joking, but you're right: it isn't there! As of 1998 it's been removed. Pick up a recent dictionary and take a look.
"A method for translating instant messages exchanged between two or more devices over a network by one or more users that communicate in different languages, the method comprising: establishing a user profile indicating at least one user language and one or more translation preferences of the one or more users; receiving a message as input composed by at least one of the users according to the user language; translating the message from the user language to at least one different language corresponding to the one or more translation preferences; and transmitting the message in translated form to at least one of the two or more devices. "
Shouldn't this patent have been refused under the "non-obvious" rule? Sure, it's a subjective thing, but come on. The "specifics" of the patent are just a laundry list of all the usual features one adds when computerizing anything. User profile with translation prefs? More than obvious. Any software that doesn't save my prefs is lame. Translation by computer? Obvious. People have been making computers translate for decades. IMing? Already exists. The "client-server-client" part is part of most IM systems already, so that's nothing new. Putting the translation system in the middle on the server? Fails the obvious test as well. Really, I fail to see how this is anything more than the usual patenting of "doing commonly known task-- with a computer!" or, the second most popular, patenting two common tasks trivially combined, e.g. "reading a book while riding a unicycle!"
What a load of crap.
Yeah, good point. I guess Sholes was a better engineer than he was a linguist.
That's exactly it. Each key was actually on the end of a long mechanical lever and those levers couldn't be right on top of one another; hence the slight staggering of the keys.
Sholes wasn't trying to create a balanced keyboard as far as finger-usage. He was only trying to alleviate the mechanical problems with the hammer bars jamming.
If that's wht he meant, he's still wrong. It wasn't meant to slow anything down. QWERTY was meant to put the HAMMER BARS on the Sholes typewriter farther apart for common digraphs in order to reduce the likelyhood of jams. That's all.
'er' and 'ty' being pretty common...
You obviously don't know how the original Sholes typewriter worked. The 'E' and 'R' hammer bars weren't next to each other. In fact, there is another aspect of the qwerty layout that hearkens back to the Sholes typewriter, and it shows how the bars were laid out. Look at your keyboard. Notice how the rows are slightly staggered, with the 'Q' a little to the left of the 'A'? On the Sholes typewriter the letter keys were on the end of long levers and (since two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time) those levers have to be offset slightly. If you take a ruler and set it vertically next to the '1' key, then slide it to the right and note order each key crosses the edge of the ruler you get the order of the hammer bars on the original typewriter (sort of-- there was no '1' or '0' on the original). Try it. I bet you get "qa2zws3xed4crf5vtg6byh7nuj8mik9,ol0.p;". Notice how ER and TY aren't next to one another?
"One of the kinks in the machine was key jamming... If a typist typed two letters one after the other too quickly, the "hammers" would hit each other... So, Sholes came up with a keyboard layout that would place letters which would be most likely struck closely in succession on opposite sides of the layout."
OK, so how does placing common digraphs at opposite ends of the keyboard "slow typing down"? That's right, it doesn't, as it only required the typist to learn a new key layout. What it does do is reduce the possibility of the hammers colliding and jamming. On an original Sholes typewriter, if you want to hit two letters whose hammers are right next to one another, you have to wait until the first letter is almost all the way back in the resting position before you hit the next letter if you want to avoid a jam. Two letters with hammers at opposite ends, though-- the first letter need only fall back a fraction of the distance before it's out of the path of the next letter. He came up with an elegant solution to an unforseen problem.
I wish people would stop villifying Sholes with the "he did it to slow us down" story.
Heh. I still use a hercules mono board with an amber monitor to debug using SoftIce. I understand one can use dual VGAs now, but that just doesn't seem right...
You raise a very good point. Anyone who's installing network wiring should use a patch panel and patch cables. Just crimping connectors on the ends of that cat5 solid wire is asking for trouble. Connecterized ends just make a big spaghetti mess, the tabs break off, and frequently the connectors don't crimp on solidly and you get infuriating intermittant connection loss. Take it from an installer (me): use a patch panel
Heh, yeah, I remember those days. All the kids would say "c'mon Dad, buy a Mac" and Dad would say "What the hell's a Mac? I'm buying an IBM like we use a work".
You raise a crucial point. I think it's important to remember that kids don't have money. And, although Linux, OO, etc. are all free, the hardware they run on isn't. So long as you have parents buying the hardware, it's gonna come with all the usual MS crap pre-installed.
It's not.
if a company lies about what their product can do, that is a breech[sic] of contract
This is why it's not. It's essentially illegal for a company to make false claims regarding its products for the same reason it's illegal to libel or slander someone. Freedom of speech has all sorts of reasonable limits. The reason commercial speech isn't as "protected" as (say) political speech is fairly obvious.
Not all businesses operate like the RIAA members.
You're right. I remembered a huge damage claim based on multiple PPV charges, but now that I think about it, it was a cable TV company vs. people who had illicit descamblers.
Then you shouldn't mind spammers. After all, you would be paying for that electricity and ISP service anyway... It doesn't take any extra electricity if I descramble DTV's signal. The signal was already there. Bad comparison.
Actually, what I meant by "more than one channel at the same time" is literally more than one channel at the same time. To wit, how can they calculate damages based on the price of a pay-per-view movie that's running every 2 hours, on five channels, start time offset by 20 minutes on each channel? OK, so the 10am showing of "AI" was descrambled. Is it reasonable to charge damages for cost of the 10:20AM showing also? And how about other PPV shows running concurrently? Is it reasonable to get damages for three different PPV events which all start at 10AM and end at noon? Sure, one could order all three, but no one ever would! The basis of their loss calculation is unreal. I think that they should have to show actual damages in order to recover damages. Fines are one thing, but damages based on unlikely or impossible alternate scenarios ("if they'd ordered every PPV, on every channel, all day") are absurd. The law may allow such pie-in-the-sky fantasy damage estimates, but in a reasonable legal system it shouldn't. I won't even go into the fact they haven't actually lost anything...
The true irony is this slashdot story linking an article about the misuse of the word "irony" and all the comments from people misusing the word irony...
Weasel maths, I'm guessing.
Indeed. The $4Billion they calculate is based on what it would cost those 3 million people to subscribe to every single channel available, which is what those people are supposedly watching. At least they're not adding in what it would cost to purchase every single pay-per-view (even the ones running concurrently), like they do when asking for damages in court. Nice logical rationale: "if we don't know what they watched, we must assume they watched everything-- at the same time"
A huge key is unnecessary. If they have the card, they have the key. The key exists solely to keep someone from whipping up a card with your user ID and getting instant access. No one is going to guess your key even if it's only 128 bits.
That way, the system is only comprised when:
a) You lose the card
b) Someone threatens you at knife-point to hand the card over.
Seeing that we already have the system you describe above (sans ridiculously large key) in use for ATMs, one has to look at the purpose of biometric authentication. Yeah, that's right: with biometric you can't easily a) lose the "key", and b) no one can easily take it from you at knifepoint.
Modified by whom? Certified for DoD use by whom? As for "services ...the army needs", even the army can't tell you that, so they'd say "just make it do everything". Also, who's going to port all the lame crap software the army already has that runs under windows? What if some of it can't be ported?
The problems you described do not happen with a properly configured system.
People don't forget passwords or forget which printer is theirs in Linux? [scoff!]
I would guess even someone in B. CO 1/509th Abn could figure out.
Figure out isn't the problem. You say Linux can be made unbreakable. Nobody who's ever given anything to an 11B (infantryman) ever calls anything unbreakable. You can't depend upon something being robust to protect it, you have to have people available who can fix it when it breaks.
No offence intended.
None taken. Hooah.
SGT DunMalg 3/187th MI Bde 101st ABN Div (Air Assault) (1987-1993)
You've obviously never worked on a military contracted project. They can't just go out and "hire Linus himself", or even say who they want to hire. They have to get all kinds of competitive bids and make sure the bidding companies have jumped through all the right hoops to be eligible. And no, they can't just form their own little software development house, either. The army tries to contract out for everything that doesn't directly support its job: land warfare. Mess hall cooks are mostly civilian now, even.
If you have your own IT department custom rolling Linux distributions for you, you are going to get things that just work and are easy to use.
Yeah? How long will it take to debug it? How long will it take to get this custom-made Linux certified for DoD use? What is your definition of "easy to use"? Easiest of all to use is the most annoyingly ubiquitous commercial OS and Office apps, which most people already know how to use before they join. Who's gonna teach thoswe dopes in the finance corps how to use this custom OS? Who do they call when something doesn't work? Linus himself? Will the army really want to pay for its own in-house OS tech support? Where will they find enough people to man the phones who know how this particular custom-built version of Linux works?
The iRobots that debuted in Afghanistan ran Linux and I don't think anybody complained about needing to anti-alias fonts or that they were too hard to use. In fact, the soldiers had a very easy time learning to use them and found them to be invaluable.
Bad comparison, man. iRobot's use of Linux is an embedded application. The army uses a non-windows based operating system for the Stinger-RMP SAM. Who cares? It's embedded. It not relevant.
The point is, the military has successfully used Linux, they did get excellent support from a vendor, and they certainly didn't pay half a billion dollars for it.
We're talking desktop computers, not limited-purpose field deployed systems. They're getting support for the iRobot-builtn PackBot, not Linux. The fact that the PackBot runs a customized Linux is totally irrelevant. They also didn't order a PackBot for every desktop computer, so saying it didn't cost .5 billion dollars is irrelevant as well.
I'd like to see the military move towards non-microsoft software, sure. But saying "for half a billion they coulda' rolled their own" is an uninformed handwave at the realities of getting anything deployed in the military.