Imagine a system where you can send email, write a book, make calculations, manipulate pictures, navigate the Web -- do whatever you want to do anytime at all, without having to switch in and out of applications. Imagine a system that never loses your work or buries it in a maze of folders, a system that doesn't wrestle with you on your way to getting something done, a system that effortlessly boosts your speed and productivity by 20 percent or more.
That's Archy. It's the answer to a host of problems that have made you mistrust, and at times hate your computer. Up until now, you've blamed yourself when your computer went off the rails. Guess what? You were right and your computer was wrong.
For two decades now, the graphical user interface -- or "GUI" (pronounced "GOO-ey") -- has been the de facto standard for human-computer interaction. But researchers have known for a long time that GUIs are inherently flawed. Nevertheless, this gooey environment has reigned supreme for so long that we've come to accept it as normal and necessary. Up until now we've had no choice.
Now we do.
In his book, The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin -- creator of the Macintosh project at Apple -- said, "Creating an interface is much like building a house: If you don't get the foundations right, no amount of decorating can fix the resulting structure."
When Jef began designing Archy, he didn't try to tweak or tinker with the GUI interface. He didn't try to decorate it. He cleared the blackboard and built a system from the ground up, giving prime consideration to the latest scientific research on human cognition.
The result is a new user interface that looks and feels completely different. Where your current computer still demands that you conform to its way of doing things, Archy adapts to your way of doing things, the humane way.
The principles behind Archy's design are applicable to all kinds of information appliances and the machines that depend on them. Today that includes aircraft, automobiles, scientific instruments, and industrial machinery. In this sense, Archy Alpha Release 1 is the beginning of a movement. Our long-range goal is a world where enlightened user interface design -- taking account of our limitations and taking advantage of our natural abilities -- becomes the standard. Our first product demonstrates that computers can add ease, convenience, power, and efficiency to our lives without adding to the list of our frustrations.
Not to mention my Prism54 'firmware'.
There needs to be a -1 FUD mod, so we can adequately mark disinformation. Free speech is important, but public flatulence is not.
I think you mean moderators.
Legislators may have been blowing off a personal review for years, true, but their staffs have been reviewing submissions for both content and kickbacks since Cincinnatus bailed.
Yeah, but I just don't accept the RMS ethical line of argumentation. Breaks down in cases exactly like the one at hand: I think LT, LM, and AT can all convincingly argue that their behavior is ethical. IOW, I think 'ethical' has a subjective character that makes theory building a challenge. I would get more mileage out of a 'moral' argument, at the expense of a bigger can of Pandora's worms going unboxed.
The market argument, IMHO, is stronger. Tell me about how these licenses manage the ideas of vendor, market, and consumer, and my meager attention span is held longer.
1. a.
Information about recent events or happenings, especially as reported by newspapers, periodicals, radio, or television.
b. A presentation of such information, as in a newspaper or on a newscast.
2. New information of any kind: The requirement was news to him.
3. Newsworthy material: "a public figure on a scale unimaginable in America; whatever he did was news" (James Atlas).
Can we agree that the idea of 'non-fiction' is intrinsic to the idea of 'news'?
The whole BK thing is turning into as bad a farce as the BBC Dr. Who 'leaked my episode?' non-event.
Hopefully, as/. becomes The Onion, another site will pick up the slack...
they don't realize that this license simply doesn't work for everybody
On the contrary: I think they realize very well the implications of the GPL, but they have raised ethical concerns to the level of a zero-sum game.
However, I don't see how anything less than such a viewpoint can keep a market going, given the tendency towards monopolies, and the indifference of the government towards those monopolies.
Maybe if we put all of the extreme characters in a room and force them to watch Barney until they agreed to get along...
An additional angle is that, if they haven't bothered with it by now, they may be unable, in the name of "squatter's rights"
Which is why LM needs to enforce his license now or never.
It's your wire. I fail to see how sniffing the packets on your own wire, for any reason, could ever be outlawed.
On the contrary, being able to check every single 1 and 0, in the name of making sure you haven't got any spyware or ongoing intrusion, seems both reasonable and essential.
Of course, LM can just put some gnarly encryption on the payload, for some performance hit, but that's the cost of doing business...
How Samba was written
---------------------
Andrew Tridgell
August 2003
Method 1:
---------
First off, there are a number of publicly available documents on the
CIFS/SMB protocol. The documents are incomplete and in places rather
inaccurate, but they are a very useful starting point. Perhaps the
most useful document is "draft-leach-cifs-v1-spec-02.txt" from 1997
which is a protocol specification released by SNIA and authored
primarily by Microsoft (with significant input from many other people,
including myself). This document has expired as an IETF draft, and
Microsoft has dropped their attempts to get CIFS accepted as an IETF
standard, but the document is still available if you look hard enough
with an internet search engine.
There are numerous other public specifications for various pieces of
the protocol available. I maintain a collection of the ones I know
about in http://samba.org/ftp/samba/specs/
Method 2:
---------
I call this method the "French Cafe technique". Imagine you wanted to
learn French, and there were no books, courses etc available to teach
you. You might decide to learn by flying to France and sitting in a
French Cafe and just listening to the conversations around you. You
take copious notes on what the customers say to the waiter and what
food arrives. That way you eventually learn the words for "bread",
"coffee" etc.
We use the same technique to learn about protocol additions that
Microsoft makes. We use a network sniffer to listen in on
conversations between Microsoft clients and servers and over time we
learn the "words" for "file size", "datestamp" as we observe what is
sent for each query.
Now one problem with the "French Cafe" technique is that you can only
learn words that the customers use. What if you want to learn other
words? Say for example you want to learn to swear in French? You would
try ordering something at the cafe, then stepping on the waiters toe
or poking him in the eye when he gives you your order. As you are
being kicked out you take copious notes on the words he uses.
The equivalent of "swear words" in a network protocol are "error
packets". When implementing Samba we need to know how to respond to
error conditions. To work this out we write a program that
deliberately accesses a file that doesn't exist, or uses a buffer that
is too small or accesses a file we don't own. Then we watch what error
code is returned for each condition, and take notes.
Method 3:
--------
Method 3 is a greatly expanded variant of the "swear words" technique
I have already mentioned. It involves writing something called a
"protocol scanner". A protocol scanner is a program that tries all
possible "words" in some section of a protocol and uses the response
to automatically deduce new information about the protocol. It is like
the French Cafe technique but with a very patient waiter.
For example, some section of the protocol might contain a 16 bit
"command word" that tells the server what operation to perform. There
are 64 thousand possible command words, so we try all of them and note
which ones give an error code other than "not implemented". Then we
need to work out how much supplementary data each command word needs,
so the program tries 1 byte of blank data, then 2 bytes then 3 bytes
etc until the server changes its response in some way. When the
response changes then you know (with a fairly high level of confidence
at least) that you are using the right quantity of data. You then try
using non-blank data, putting in a filename or a directory name or a
username until the server changes its response again. After a large
number of tries the program eventually finds a combination of data
that gives no error code at all - the server
Here
Given his success at SAMBA, it's a reasonable bet that
he can do it
he's ethical
The obvious question is, how much better will we all be when a good merging application is as free as the fundamental theorem of calculus?
Why get into what amounts to a denial of service attack, by offering bait to the chattering classes?
Ironically, you can bet disinterest in dealing with 'almost interoperable' protocols is among (though by no means the sole one of) Larry M's motives for pulling the plug on Linux. Neither Tridge nor Larry owe any of us the time of day.
After RTFA, I can respect Larry's stance, and only hope that FOSS can step up to the plate soon.
I think the system name is/was ICASS, and, as you would expect, those wrinkles were ironed.
Interestingly, talking with someone Who Would Know, the US Navy has the largest existing NT4 deployment.
<apocryphal>
Asked to explain the mindless Luddism in the face of humiliation, when unable to support recent groupware solutions used by allied navies in bi-lateral operations, the stone-walling Civil Servants obstructing all attempts at unborking the situation said: "Tradition, man, tradition."
</apocryphal>
Slashdot Mirror
No, those MS guys see sharp.
Just don't bring up the Easter Buggy.
just an 's' shy of immaculate...
Not to mention my Prism54 'firmware'.
There needs to be a -1 FUD mod, so we can adequately mark disinformation.
Free speech is important, but public flatulence is not.
Likely the former, or he'd have touted eshell.el.
I think you mean moderators.
Legislators may have been blowing off a personal review for years, true, but their staffs have been reviewing submissions for both content and kickbacks since Cincinnatus bailed.
Yeah, but I just don't accept the RMS ethical line of argumentation. Breaks down in cases exactly like the one at hand: I think LT, LM, and AT can all convincingly argue that their behavior is ethical. IOW, I think 'ethical' has a subjective character that makes theory building a challenge. I would get more mileage out of a 'moral' argument, at the expense of a bigger can of Pandora's worms going unboxed.
The market argument, IMHO, is stronger. Tell me about how these licenses manage the ideas of vendor, market, and consumer, and my meager attention span is held longer.
Can we agree that the idea of 'non-fiction' is intrinsic to the idea of 'news'?
The whole BK thing is turning into as bad a farce as the BBC Dr. Who 'leaked my episode?' non-event.
Hopefully, as
The Autarch totally owns the KH.
Since when could the KH reboot the sun?
(shoots KH with HK)
when was the last time you seriously thought about it?
saw your nick
DAN?
This pirst-foster smells like Haxalot, methinks.
-1 Offtopic
However, I don't see how anything less than such a viewpoint can keep a market going, given the tendency towards monopolies, and the indifference of the government towards those monopolies.
Maybe if we put all of the extreme characters in a room and force them to watch Barney until they agreed to get along...
1. In your mailbox, you discover a subpoena.
2. ????
3. (Profit)!!!
An additional angle is that, if they haven't bothered with it by now, they may be unable, in the name of "squatter's rights"
Which is why LM needs to enforce his license now or never.
No, man, coming down off the pseudomorphine is the bigger concern.
It's your wire. I fail to see how sniffing the packets on your own wire, for any reason, could ever be outlawed.
On the contrary, being able to check every single 1 and 0, in the name of making sure you haven't got any spyware or ongoing intrusion, seems both reasonable and essential.
Of course, LM can just put some gnarly encryption on the payload, for some performance hit, but that's the cost of doing business...
(prostituting anonymously)
Go, AT!
How Samba was written
---------------------
Andrew Tridgell
August 2003
Method 1:
---------
First off, there are a number of publicly available documents on the
CIFS/SMB protocol. The documents are incomplete and in places rather
inaccurate, but they are a very useful starting point. Perhaps the
most useful document is "draft-leach-cifs-v1-spec-02.txt" from 1997
which is a protocol specification released by SNIA and authored
primarily by Microsoft (with significant input from many other people,
including myself). This document has expired as an IETF draft, and
Microsoft has dropped their attempts to get CIFS accepted as an IETF
standard, but the document is still available if you look hard enough
with an internet search engine.
There are numerous other public specifications for various pieces of
the protocol available. I maintain a collection of the ones I know
about in http://samba.org/ftp/samba/specs/
Method 2:
---------
I call this method the "French Cafe technique". Imagine you wanted to
learn French, and there were no books, courses etc available to teach
you. You might decide to learn by flying to France and sitting in a
French Cafe and just listening to the conversations around you. You
take copious notes on what the customers say to the waiter and what
food arrives. That way you eventually learn the words for "bread",
"coffee" etc.
We use the same technique to learn about protocol additions that
Microsoft makes. We use a network sniffer to listen in on
conversations between Microsoft clients and servers and over time we
learn the "words" for "file size", "datestamp" as we observe what is
sent for each query.
Now one problem with the "French Cafe" technique is that you can only
learn words that the customers use. What if you want to learn other
words? Say for example you want to learn to swear in French? You would
try ordering something at the cafe, then stepping on the waiters toe
or poking him in the eye when he gives you your order. As you are
being kicked out you take copious notes on the words he uses.
The equivalent of "swear words" in a network protocol are "error
packets". When implementing Samba we need to know how to respond to
error conditions. To work this out we write a program that
deliberately accesses a file that doesn't exist, or uses a buffer that
is too small or accesses a file we don't own. Then we watch what error
code is returned for each condition, and take notes.
Method 3:
--------
Method 3 is a greatly expanded variant of the "swear words" technique
I have already mentioned. It involves writing something called a
"protocol scanner". A protocol scanner is a program that tries all
possible "words" in some section of a protocol and uses the response
to automatically deduce new information about the protocol. It is like
the French Cafe technique but with a very patient waiter.
For example, some section of the protocol might contain a 16 bit
"command word" that tells the server what operation to perform. There
are 64 thousand possible command words, so we try all of them and note
which ones give an error code other than "not implemented". Then we
need to work out how much supplementary data each command word needs,
so the program tries 1 byte of blank data, then 2 bytes then 3 bytes
etc until the server changes its response in some way. When the
response changes then you know (with a fairly high level of confidence
at least) that you are using the right quantity of data. You then try
using non-blank data, putting in a filename or a directory name or a
username until the server changes its response again. After a large
number of tries the program eventually finds a combination of data
that gives no error code at all - the server
modulo various religious/philosophical figures for some values of 'successful'
Given his success at SAMBA, it's a reasonable bet that
he can do it
he's ethical
The obvious question is, how much better will we all be when a good merging application is as free as the fundamental theorem of calculus?
Why get into what amounts to a denial of service attack, by offering bait to the chattering classes?
Ironically, you can bet disinterest in dealing with 'almost interoperable' protocols is among (though by no means the sole one of) Larry M's motives for pulling the plug on Linux. Neither Tridge nor Larry owe any of us the time of day.
After RTFA, I can respect Larry's stance, and only hope that FOSS can step up to the plate soon.
1. Space
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
I think the system name is/was ICASS, and, as you would expect, those wrinkles were ironed.
Interestingly, talking with someone Who Would Know, the US Navy has the largest existing NT4 deployment.
<apocryphal>
Asked to explain the mindless Luddism in the face of humiliation,
when unable to support recent groupware solutions used by allied navies in bi-lateral operations,
the stone-walling Civil Servants obstructing all attempts at unborking the situation said:
"Tradition, man, tradition."
</apocryphal>