This seems to be yet another example of a useless security feature from MS.
Why useless? Well I admit that in principal it would be great to stop people running only "authorised" programs on any of the PCs I maintain , the problem is with the definition of authorised. Many of the programs we use are written "in-house" and are not going to get authorised, we teach programming so the students code is not going to get authorised, we knock together small scripts to help us automate a task which we may do once or twice and are not going to get authorised.
All this authorisation will cost money - so if I want to use any of my own tools, or anything useful that somebody else has written that hasn't been authorised I've got to switch the setting off. And of course it's a global setting so that's it off for all programs. The result is a security feature that adds to the illusion of security without adding to the substance.
If only MS had put just a little bit more thought into it and made it on a per program basis and allowed the sysadmin/root to "authorise" programs for their machines it would have been *very* useful. Of course the cynic in me says that that way they wouldn't have as much control....
There are lots of distributed OSs out there, MACH, AMOEBA, SPRITE, Plan 9, CHORUS, etc. and more recently we've had cluster computers such as Beowulf joining the fray. However using "AI" to do even basic load balancing is problematic. Oxford Brookes are trying to do this using a mobile ganets model, but it does not look promising - most other people are sensibly staying well clear of it.
Where distributed computing and AI will make an impact on peoples life is that distributed computing gives potentially much more compute power to a program and AI is *very* compute intensive for real world tasks. Imagine the ability to do real time summarisation and decent semantic analysis of the web pages returned by your search engine so it is much more readily apparent which ones are interesting, imagine a game of quake where each bot has it's own computer controlling it, imagine the ability to do proper knowledge management on your documents, there's even a possibility that the paperclip might say something useful! These are all things that can be done with the current level of AI technology, but not in anything like real time. With distributed computing (and lots of tweaking of the algorithms) we can try to reach real time response.
I'm often amazed & saddened by the difference gender makes in computing. As "Dr. Mitchell", most people - students and fellow academics alike - assume that I'm male until it's proven otherwise. When they do find out that I'm female there is very often a change in their attitude, often a "dumbing down" of explanations (which is really amusing coming from a student!). Or if they do see me before hearing my name, they assume that I'm one of the secretaries. Go out into the "real world" and it is even worse (On one occassion an employee of a certain national UK computer store spent 20 min trying to persuade me in a very patronising way that Office would run on my Linux box and that as a man with his vast amount of training he knew better than a mere woman)
The sad thing is, this occurs in both women and men, and most people are unaware that they are doing it. When you point it out to them they are often mortified and try and change their behaviour (which tends to work for about 48hrs)
The solution? Well, I'm not sure if there is one for computing alone - it's a society wide problem. Sure more woman in computing would help, but we're not going to get more woman in the technical subjects until peoples (both men and women) attitude's change and we become less hung up on what a person's gender is.
Actually it's under UK law that Demon are held responsible, not English, though they were tried in an English court (Demon is owned by a Scottish company)
My Sysadmin at my old job had an interesting "out" when it came to scanning web caches/directories/email for porn. It basically went something like this - he found porn offensive & distastefull (well he said he did anyway), there was nothing in his contract that said he had to subject himself to such distastefull duties, therefore he did not have to search for porn.:-)
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This seems to be yet another example of a useless security feature from MS.
Why useless? Well I admit that in principal it would be great to stop people running only "authorised" programs on any of the PCs I maintain , the problem is with the definition of authorised. Many of the programs we use are written "in-house" and are not going to get authorised, we teach programming so the students code is not going to get authorised, we knock together small scripts to help us automate a task which we may do once or twice and are not going to get authorised.
All this authorisation will cost money - so if I want to use any of my own tools, or anything useful that somebody else has written that hasn't been authorised I've got to switch the setting off. And of course it's a global setting so that's it off for all programs. The result is a security feature that adds to the illusion of security without adding to the substance.
If only MS had put just a little bit more thought into it and made it on a per program basis and allowed the sysadmin/root to "authorise" programs for their machines it would have been *very* useful. Of course the cynic in me says that that way they wouldn't have as much control....
TTFN
Faye
There are lots of distributed OSs out there, MACH, AMOEBA, SPRITE, Plan 9, CHORUS, etc. and more recently we've had cluster computers such as Beowulf joining the fray. However using "AI" to do even basic load balancing is problematic. Oxford Brookes are trying to do this using a mobile ganets model, but it does not look promising - most other people are sensibly staying well clear of it.
Where distributed computing and AI will make an impact on peoples life is that distributed computing gives potentially much more compute power to a program and AI is *very* compute intensive for real world tasks. Imagine the ability to do real time summarisation and decent semantic analysis of the web pages returned by your search engine so it is much more readily apparent which ones are interesting, imagine a game of quake where each bot has it's own computer controlling it, imagine the ability to do proper knowledge management on your documents, there's even a possibility that the paperclip might say something useful! These are all things that can be done with the current level of AI technology, but not in anything like real time. With distributed computing (and lots of tweaking of the algorithms) we can try to reach real time response.
TTFN
Faye
I'm often amazed & saddened by the difference gender makes in computing. As "Dr. Mitchell", most people - students and fellow academics alike - assume that I'm male until it's proven otherwise. When they do find out that I'm female there is very often a change in their attitude, often a "dumbing down" of explanations (which is really amusing coming from a student!). Or if they do see me before hearing my name, they assume that I'm one of the secretaries. Go out into the "real world" and it is even worse (On one occassion an employee of a certain national UK computer store spent 20 min trying to persuade me in a very patronising way that Office would run on my Linux box and that as a man with his vast amount of training he knew better than a mere woman)
The sad thing is, this occurs in both women and men, and most people are unaware that they are doing it. When you point it out to them they are often mortified and try and change their behaviour (which tends to work for about 48hrs)
The solution? Well, I'm not sure if there is one for computing alone - it's a society wide problem. Sure more woman in computing would help, but we're not going to get more woman in the technical subjects until peoples (both men and women) attitude's change and we become less hung up on what a person's gender is.
TTFN
Faye
Actually it's under UK law that Demon are held responsible, not English, though they were tried in an English court (Demon is owned by a Scottish company)
Faye
My Sysadmin at my old job had an interesting "out" when it came to scanning web caches/directories/email for porn. It basically went something like this - he found porn offensive & distastefull (well he said he did anyway), there was nothing in his contract that said he had to subject himself to such distastefull duties, therefore he did not have to search for porn. :-)