Nevermind the vagueries of copyright law and its applicability to Chinese-hosted site, what matters is that this is likely to be a visible loss of face for the ROC Olympic Committee. Given the Chinese proclivity to punish moral crimes on a spectrum that ranges from extreme public humiliation to summary execution, I'm curious if the I-only-reused-16% developer will have 16% of his/her body mass removed for reuse after the executionvan comes for a visit?
I could carefully analyze your requirements, survey the available tech, and propose a set of devices that might satisfy your needs... but I think some comparative empiricism would be quicker and less nerd-tastic. I'm based in the US, travel extensively & work in third-world/quasi-decrepit first-world locales, and like to travel light. I also like to buy all sorts of new doodads... so let me dig thru the backpack and describe the items that have not been tossed as useless, broken, or given away over the past 3-4 years.
The laptop is the previous generation T-series Thinkpad. (A T42p to be specific.) Two reasons: durability and versatility. I simply have not had good luck with Dell -- two broken screens and several other hinge/latch/key problems in a handful of years. My office right now is basically on the edge of a desert, and the tpad cleans up more easily when dusty and gritty. The Ultrabay design is also tremendously useful, allowing me to add a second battery, DVDR or pop in a second hard drive w/o tools. (Truecrypt is your friend.) When I'm parked in a client's site for a while, I bring a tpad dock that has an ultrabay slot for the second drive, which helps with *actually* doing a full backup every week. (Think of it as very very slow RAID 0.)
There's a Sony-Ericsson P1i phone. Slightly more advanced than its predecessor M600i, it gives me worldwide GSM roaming with WCDMA/3G and wifi. It runs Skype (Fring), gmail, opera, quickoffice, pdf+, printboy, and a few other useful things. The camera is a bit slow, but 3.2mpix served me well for taking pics of Petra and the Taj Mahal. It's the smallest and most portable form you will find a full QWERTY keyboard.
There's a small no-name bluetooth GPS. With a AAA nimh battery, sirfstar chipset and USB port/charger, it works with the laptop as a wired device and doesn't require its own charger. I run GPS software on the phone when I need a portable display. Larger gps units have proven quite redundant and not worth the weight and hassle -- if there are good road maps for an area I just print them and take the small unit.
Back at the hotel/apt/office, there's a battery-powered HP Deskjet 450. It's probably the biggest compromise weight-to-value-wise, but for longer gigs I would not go without it. If I bring it, the power supply is similar to those for Thinkpads & doubles as a back-up for the laptop. (This does not work with the newer T60/similar.) The newer DJ460 is even smaller.
A Canon TX1. This usually stays in the bag until I need something very nice. 7mpix, image stabilization, HD video, and with a small mod (clipping the screen-closed shutoff button) it is unobtrusive enough for snapshots in military dictatorships. It also takes the same rechargeable battery as some older models, so replacements are available in remote places. It looks like a silver cigarette box unless you see the lens from the front. Walking across the border from Gaza, would I want to have the similar-function competitor from Sanyo (Xacti)? It looks like a pistol. 'Nuff said.
A Buffalo Airstation hi-power wifi card, and its matching folding 9dbi antenna. I have more wifi gear than you do, but am I gonna pack the 19dbi flat-panel everywhere? Thru customs? Puh-leez. This one fits in a jacket pocket, doesn't get a second look from security people, and it works well on win/linux/mac. *Someone* in the area will have an unsecured AP when you need it.
A Molskine pocket notebook and pen. For those 12-hour waits at the border, nowhere near a power outlet, while some underpaid socialist frontier guard holding your passport is waiting for a fax from the consulate to determine whether you're CIA or not.
It will be the platform for all future updates, and Windows Update will nag you silly until you install it.
Huh... That's odd. I haven't seen a Windows Update nag since I installed Ubuntu last year and put Windows in VM, where it belongs.
Nobody is putting off releasing software, migrating systems, or so on until Windows 7 comes around. While they do that, their whole business will suffer. [...] 3-5 months, maybe. 16 months- you're out of your mind.
Read it and weep, Hot Stuff: Consumers are buying what's shoved at them , but even arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080106-despite-problems-consumers-choosing-vista-over-xp.html says (and references more solid data) that they're not necessarily *running* it, and 70% of small businesses are sticking with XP when purchasing new systems. What exactly are they suffering from, aside from saving a little money and getting a little better performance? What fools are releasing Vista-only software with a 1/3 adoption rate in your own platform base after a year? Yep, someone's suffering, but it ain't the folks waiting to see what shakes out.
I was surprised when Microsoft announced that Windows 7 (successor to Vista) will probably be out in about 16 months. Seems like they're stealing their own whimpery thunder re Vista. The release of SP1 for Vista is surely a relief for those who already adopted it, but what about the masses who were waiting for SP1 --- the proverbial "We'll wait for the bugs to be worked out" crowd?
All those folks (including my own org) are now looking at VistaSP1 vs W7 and wondering about the wisdom of adopting Vista at all. If W7 comes out mid-next year, and there's a W7SP1 about a year later... That means right now that Vista offers barely more than a two-year period of stable operation for an entire platform change. With XP still chugging along merrily (with better stability and lower HW expense/requirements) I really don't see the value for any but the smallest organization.
I ordered two -- in the first hour of the first day of the promotion -- to be shipped to my house in the US. As of today, I have nothing. No laptops, no email, no nuthin.' I phoned and confirmed that my order number does exist and indeed I have been charged for both the laptops (in November) and $50 for shipping (the day after Christmas).
But it's not the lack of laptops that's turning me from an interested and cheerful donor, to mild annoyance when it didn't show up before Christmas, to contemplating reversing the charges. It's the lack of information. Sure, there are delays. Sure, there are priorities for getting big shipments out to major educational recipients. But I gave these folks $850, and I don't even get the courtesy of a *status* message?
According to the schedule, mine should have showed up a month ago -- at the absolute latest. Before Christmas. I made the mistake of telling my kids about it, thinking I would teach them something about partnerships and donations, etc etc, and that's my own fault. But *still* even after phone calls and tracing and corrections... when I check the laptopgiving.org page, it tells me the order number is invalid, and that my email address is not found.
The kicker is that I work for a UN agency that manages large refugee aid programs, and I had to borrow an OLPC from a friend to show it to the Education & IT department directors. They're very interested in the OLPC, as it fits some of the educational needs pretty nicely. What am I going to tell these guys when they ask whether the project is well-run, has decent governance, and can deliver?
"what good is a file system if you can't write to it?"
I could say the same of NTFS. After throwing in the towel with regard to Windows as a base OS, I have years of accumulated data on NTFS volumes spread across a small pile of drives. Linux support for NTFS is still a little shaky. But with read-only access to NTFS, I can throw those old desktop or laptop drives into an enclosure, connect it, and either pull all the data over to a writable volume for ongoing work (and perhaps dispose of the old drive), or pick out individual pieces of data I want without worry of corrupting the volume.
How does this apply to ZFS? Not sure, since "piles of old data" isn't a likely scenario on ZFS. But I can imagine accessing shared NAS/SAN ZFS volumes with only one system managing dynamic allocation... or perhaps ZFS in place of ISO9660 to speed up large software installations?
ok, i appreciate the true geekitude of taping your fingers with reflective stuff to air-type, but editing the video to 4:04 is just over the top nerdiness.
If Galileo's telescope launched itself, went to Jupiter, circled the moons, took pictures, calculated anomalies (=decided what was mathematically interesting), and corrected its own course and adjusted its own eyepiece to take even more detailed pictures and then sent them back for another researcher to analyze, then yes.
If you read http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/ it's notable that Cassini is a nuclear-powered robot that processes data "in situ" from remote and direct sensing equipment. It's not just a remote-control telescope; it navigates independently (by command, not direct control) and several of the instruments pre-process data and *decide* what's worth looking at prior to data transmission. If the robot sends data and a request to look at some cool anomaly, is the person receiving the message a discoverer?
So the folks at Boulder announced it, but did they really discover it? Cassini's a pretty sophisticated robot and did all of the observation and a lot of the discerning and differentiation work, so when do we start to give credit where credit is due? It's now generally accepted that Rosalind Franklin was one of the primary discoverers of DNA (Watson's petty and dismissive BS aside), so why is this so different? A robot discovered this (former) moon, not a human. Do we name it after Cassini?
This is the sort of morally right but legally wrong (in some places) service that ought to move into an anonymously-hosted service such as Freenet. There are several caveats to this tho -- it only works for a community-supported decentralized project, it's harder to maintain, and it's a tacit admission that the activities are impermissible in some locales. On the other hand, there are some things -- works of art in public domain, classic texts, referential materials, unpopular political speech, and the like -- that ought to have a safe haven.
What kind of safe haven? Safe where information that/ought/ to be free (libre) can be posted and retrieved by all, but not pushed on anyone, not traced to anyone, and not deletable. Unfortunately there are certain commercial entities (not all -- I'm not anti-captialist) that have made a mockery of IP laws in the US And EU, and they have considerable influence. A while back, I saw a political sticker with a skull and crossbones, with the line "Voting is not the only answer" under it. While that's a little extreme, there is a time for civil disobedience, and a mode for using technology to simply override the restrictions of those who are morally wrong. A purely legal fight may take decades or even lifetimes, so sometimes it's better & faster to just destroy a bad business model that has societally-destructive effects by technical means, if not proper ones.
Also (and I know this will come up), no, Freenet and Tor are not nests of pedophiles where sheet music is lost in the filth. Yes, there are unfortunately visible and inevitable misusers of anonymous networks, but whatever the trolls might say, pictures do not cause abuse (and as this week's events demonstrate, there are very positive effects to abusers clickitying their i-thought-it-was-distorted faces on teh intarwebs). On the other hand, freedom to inform does cause aid to come to those who need it in a political/refugee sense, and freedom to share does further the cause of art and literature in a locked-away-text or book-burning sense. I continue to support these anonymous networks for the same reason I would not demand that we have a crime-free neighborhood before coming to the aid of those who need safe harbor in a more immediate sense.
Yes, it's been requested of the OOo team quite a few times over the past 4-5 years. ODF intuitively matches this concept, but implementing it apparently requires some nontrivial change to the Writer codebase. And a little more enthusiasm by those who could code it (wish I could). If I could direct my OOo donation to this one feature, I'd give $XXX instead of my paltry $XX donation. There's some background available here: http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/category/writing
J
*sigh* ... still no outline mode in OOo Writer.
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OpenOffice.org 2.3 Review
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Every release -- even a small point release like this one -- I hope that the OOo developers will add an outline mode to Writer. And every release I'm disappointed. I really like OOo, but this one missing feature keeps me from using it for serious work becuase it makes large document planning and writing production in Writer sloooooow.
And before some n00b who's never written a 200-page document jumps all over me: No, the OOo "Navigator" does not provide an outline mode. It provides something akin to a re-organizable TOC in a floating window, but it doesn't provide the productivity enhancements afforded by inline hierarchical control within the editing window. This is one function that MS Word got right. For example, in Word I can start typing and make a list in normal text, click into "outline mode" and either use a key shortcut or a single click-drag to promote/demote some text to headings (while leaving other items as content), or re-order paragraphs of text or headings. To do the same thing in OOo's Navigator, I need to switch to a different window to reorganize headings, but switch back to the editing window to resume editing content. I also need to switch between two windows to split a heading into two sections, switch back to move it, and switch again to resume composing content -- something I can do with a CR and single mouse-drag in Word.
Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right! Or do it one-better and improve on the similar inline hierarchical editing from FrameMaker+SGML. Or innovate some collapsible tag interface from something like the old HotMeTaL from SoftQuad. (But don't trash the Navigator; it *is* useful for final proofing, just not composition)
If, as you say, "I don't even think I understand what the hell you're talking about," then what good can come of putting your fingers on the keyboard? If you'd paused for a moment of thought before posting this knee-jerk Microsoft apologist tripe, you would see I'm not criticizing IIS directly -- only how it's used, and how that affects measurements of market share (which is the topic of TFA, if you had only read it).
Your statement "This study only counts active, stable web servers on the actual Internet, not copies installed on a laptop for use on a WAN" belies your misunderstanding. These aren't hidden copies. A great majority of these remote single-user systems look to all the world to be public webservers, with public entry pages, with major applications behind them. Netcraft can't distinguish between these empty-calorie 1-user webservers and, say, the front end for a major e-commerce site.
The experience regarding the MS consulting architects (the story you blew thru) indicates that this is not an anomaly; that it's becoming quite common for massive numbers of low-end poorly-designed but publicly-exposed systems to have IIS thrown into the mix. In this context, through no fault of the quality of IIS, saying that IIS is "gaining market share" because of server numbers is meaningless.
Quite separately, I'm of the personal opinion that IIS is crap.
Even accounting for the GoDaddy domain-parking nonsense, there's not much to these numbers. An IIS server is not equal to an Apache server in any way, shape or form. It would be like saying there are more IIS bicycles on the road than Apache locomotives, so therefore IIS is more important to the transport of people or goods. It's demonstrably bunk. While quantitative evidence is out there regarding applications and numbers of users per server, I think the following anecdotal bit sums it up nicely.
In a very large quasi-governmental organization, we have a major application that runs on a handful of Oracle systems and serves double-digit thousands of people with acceptable performance over the last half dozen years. There is an ill-thought-out project underway (a year into development) to replace this with a steaming pile of.NET. And it's a BIG pile.
How big? Follow me on this one: First they modeled the.NET application on the old client-server app, but the network chatter was 20x the capacity of the network because the MS-trained app architects could not wrap their heads around the idea of a constrained WAN. What used to be a small record lookup and update of about 300k over the wire turned into more than 6MB of inter-domain line noise.
Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app. Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.
The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks...BLINK... BLINK... don't seem to recognize there's even an issue.
So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the.NET mess for purposes it's clearly incapable of serving and that even Apache would be no good for. Just my subjective opinion, but I don't think anyone would ever do this with Apache. The result is that a single project -- an abject failure of a bad design from every meaningful metric, and the willful ignorance of user requirements in favor of vendor fantasies -- shows up on a webserver market share survey as a several-thousand-instance win for MS. By all indication from MS consultants, this is not a unique event.
Bullshit. Bull. Shit. Just because there's a growing ocean of (mis)information and lots of tools to search through the disorganized mess doesn't mean that being lazy is ok, or that taxonomy has lost its usefulness. The same goes for txt-ing fools and 1337-speak d00dz; just because you can doesn't mean you should. (Or that your misapplied, sloppy comunicashunz skilz are worthy of respect.)
I lead teams of consultants giving advice about information to big organizations (big whoop, but it's usually the personal kind, like medical or financial data that might be personally damaging or hurtful if disclosed). Half the time this work takes the form of technology advice, but just as often it's process and governance advising that borders on legal advice. If I or any of these guys crib an opinion from the Intarwebs, we will be busted. If citations are not properly given, we will be busted. If we don't express a complete chain of reasoning that supports each and every considered opinion, we will be busted. You get the idea. Anything less is disrespectful to the people who pay us good money for finding information, considering it, and making decisions about it. It's exactly the kind of thing for which a term paper is good practice.
The same goes for presentations, articles, books, proposals, sales agreements, and even resumes. If you want to establish a fact, convince someone of a position, or persuade someone else to help you, you *must* be able to express a structured, supported opinion, and know the difference between verbatim quotes, derived ideas, and the rare original thought.
Writing is as important as it ever has been. Research is as important as it ever has been. And reasoning is even more important.
I'm sure as hell teaching *my* kids how to do term papers, because I do one for every client every couple of weeks. Some of it may be formulaic drivel, but some of it is really enjoyable stuff worthy of some professional pride. If the unwashed masses don't want to practice for nice jobs in the real world, then fine. Ditch the term papers. And have fun sorting my mail down in the mailroom aspiring to a first-level helpdesk gig, or painting my garage.
Ok -- aside from the debate about whether or not she was arrested because of the possessions (files under her control), or that the possessions were noted after she was arrested because of other connections... I worry about this because I cross US borders many times a year for work, and I'm occasionally in possession of materials on my laptop that might make me a suspect for computer crime. Most of it is part of my job, but some is just the result of morbid curiosity.
Aside from the obvious suggestion to simply delete it all -- which amounts to saying I should not read up on my own industry while I'm in the hotel each night on the road -- what are some good cross-platform solutions for encrypting whole sets of data?
PGPdisk is nice, but can those volumes can be mounted from Linux?
AES-encrypted DMG files are great on OS X, but can they be mounted on any other OS?
I really dig BURP (elliptic curve) but is there any tool to archive multiple files inside a BURP file? Let me browse without saving temp files? On Linux and Windows?
Inquiring minds want to know, and google turns up either too much or too little with my fat fingers. At this point, when I'm travelling to places where I might be hassled on my return, I'm tending towards a dummy Windows installation on C: with an an obfuscated and encrypted set of VMware images on a VFAT partition that I load using a bootable CD with Knoppix. Not the best (it keeps the TSA drones at bay) but I'm interested in more elegant and simple solutions.
"Should parents tell their kids before they monitor?"
Umm, can I have a "Hell yeah"??? I just wrote an article on Computerworld (blatant plug) about what a terrible idea it is to be secretive about this sort of thing with your kids. When they figure out you're using filters, router logs and keyloggers, and lying about it, they won't ever trust you again. Ever. Even with a $20 bill. And they might even write you off as a perv and cut off communications. (I had one moderately well-known figure in IT Security admit to me this weekend that he'd secretly installed keylogger software on his tech-savvy kid's computer when he started to use an encrypted proxy for private conversations with his girlfriend. What a positively boneheaded move -- I wonder how that'll turn out in a few years.)
It's shameless self-promotion, but I just wrote an article on computerworld about basic security and privacy issues for the homeless and/or other perennially wandering folks. There's a little coverage about identity establishment there too, along with general protection of information and resources.
My old security consultancy was assimilated by Symantec. Our technological and biological distinctiveness was added to their own. Our individuality was irrelevant. We didn't even get to keep a sub-brand ("@stake, a Symantec Company") like Norton did. Now we're lost in the homogeneous blob. Of course, that was a now-obvious screw-up, because the sales people still say things like "our professional services staff is based on the expertise of @stake..." It's great for little yellow boxes of product, but two years on, the Symantec name still doesn't stand on its own with respect to security consulting. Not when commissions depend on it.
The people at McAfee/NA were a bit brighter about it, and the value of the Foundstone name and reputation wasn't squandered as badly as it could have been when they got bought out. Sure Foundstone shed people just as @stake did, but there's a world of difference. They decided to follow perceived distinctiveness as a tool for selling consulting, and perceived ubiquity as a tool to sell products; the names differentiate them.
Good luck to RSA. I'm sure they'll keep the name, expand their consulting services and probably give us a hell of a run for our money. (What with EMC already competing with Veritas/Symantec...) It's gonna be an interesting time.
J
*Best line this week: "If you're happy and you know it, stick with your current dosage."
Good. More jobs for me, and with a little work, my kids. (Ok, it's a lot of work, including reading to my kids 30-45 minutes a day, and the older one (6) is transitioning to reading to us. But I digress.)
Seriously, not everyone can be a rocket scientist. Some folks have to take less mentally-strenuous jobs, and the upside to that is that it takes less education and effort to get a job that focuses on rote process or repetitive simple problem-solving. Of course, there's the whole unfairness issue relating to people who work in jobs that are physically or emotionally draining for shit pay, but that's not the issue here. It used to be that motivated people could rise to hit the maximum vocation that their formal or self education allowed. Now it seems that educated people sink to the vocational level that their self motivation and application of that education allows. Same effect, no?
My brother, for example, is an overeducated undermotivated weenie who's dumbed himself down with IM-speak, and wonders why he's not an appealing job candidate. But that brings up an interesting issue: I don't think that the deterioration of language skills can be examined in a vacuum. What about the deterioration of social skills that seems to accompany the IM-speak txting crap? IM/TXT communciations involve effects from reduced level of effort, lack of persistence, reduced affect, and perceived levels of anonymity.
All I have is anecdotal evidence, but the idea of sending thank-you letters, participating in professional societies, and writing articles for review by your peers seems totally alien to that crowd. And I don't mean to be stuck-up about that. An article for your peers might be a well-written blog entry or a political rant in email, not necessarily an academic paper. >>>> My point is that if you notice that people are sharing soundbites instead of whole ideas, then it makes sense to take a look at the mode of sharing, not just the sound-bite vs whole-idea issue.
Symantec has been told by the Feds to stop exporting LC5? Oh, the horror. Except it's horseshit. I was part of Symantec's aquisition of @stake, and if the Feds have anything to do with this, it's far and away a secondary reason for the restriction.
The truth of the matter is that Sym's Legal dept is terrified of LC5, and this is a convenient excuse if it's true at all. Just as they were frightened by the liability and publicity implications of @stake's decompilation and automated app security checking tool, and are "spinning it off." God forbid someone runs that tool against one of their own products. (Not that it's happened.:) Similarly, they were so terrified of @stake's WebProxy (imho the best app for web app security assessment/pentest) that they deep-sixed it so far that many product and services sales droids were told to deny its existence.
It's a damn shame. These were great tools. I wonder if it's better to have them die suddenly, than go the Norton route of slow deterioration and bloat...? Criminy, it's only been 14 months since the @stake aquisition, and from what I know since departing there are no products left from @stake and a very small percentage of the @stake staff left. Not a very well-managed investment, if you ask me.
Awfergodsake... Batman can have nipples that could cut glass on his costume (not to mention the whole matching Robin homoerotic costumerie), the Mystique character from x-men can crawl across the screen buck-ass nekkid but for a few well-placed scaly-things, and even the Spy Kids characters have proto-breasts and pouches to stimulate the (hopefully) 12-year old pervs in the audience. And I'm still scrubbing my brain from watching the characters in Lost in Space.
And Superman can't appear too male. Jebus. I'm not in favor of having a super-dong waved in my kid's face on the big screen, but come on, the bar is pretty low these days. This is the least of my worries.
"Those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the U.S. defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly
Or what?
They're gonna go back to the sea, tell their brethren about what worthless abusive slobs we are, teach them some new tool-using concepts, and launch a revolution? Absurd, yes, but if we're still training animals to do our military dirty work these days, with exotic weapons no less -- and most of our military actions are motivated by unfathomable political stupidity and testosterone-poisoning -- we've all richly earned such an obtuse end.
I say more power to 'em, goddamit. Next time you see me rowing out and dumping bags full of rubber-handled tools (easy to grip w/teeth), supplies, and beer into the ocean, you'll know what I'm up to.
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Oops. I forgot the "People" part of teh Republic of China...
Nevermind the vagueries of copyright law and its applicability to Chinese-hosted site, what matters is that this is likely to be a visible loss of face for the ROC Olympic Committee. Given the Chinese proclivity to punish moral crimes on a spectrum that ranges from extreme public humiliation to summary execution, I'm curious if the I-only-reused-16% developer will have 16% of his/her body mass removed for reuse after the execution van comes for a visit?
I could carefully analyze your requirements, survey the available tech, and propose a set of devices that might satisfy your needs... but I think some comparative empiricism would be quicker and less nerd-tastic. I'm based in the US, travel extensively & work in third-world/quasi-decrepit first-world locales, and like to travel light. I also like to buy all sorts of new doodads... so let me dig thru the backpack and describe the items that have not been tossed as useless, broken, or given away over the past 3-4 years.
The laptop is the previous generation T-series Thinkpad. (A T42p to be specific.) Two reasons: durability and versatility. I simply have not had good luck with Dell -- two broken screens and several other hinge/latch/key problems in a handful of years. My office right now is basically on the edge of a desert, and the tpad cleans up more easily when dusty and gritty. The Ultrabay design is also tremendously useful, allowing me to add a second battery, DVDR or pop in a second hard drive w/o tools. (Truecrypt is your friend.) When I'm parked in a client's site for a while, I bring a tpad dock that has an ultrabay slot for the second drive, which helps with *actually* doing a full backup every week. (Think of it as very very slow RAID 0.)
There's a Sony-Ericsson P1i phone. Slightly more advanced than its predecessor M600i, it gives me worldwide GSM roaming with WCDMA/3G and wifi. It runs Skype (Fring), gmail, opera, quickoffice, pdf+, printboy, and a few other useful things. The camera is a bit slow, but 3.2mpix served me well for taking pics of Petra and the Taj Mahal. It's the smallest and most portable form you will find a full QWERTY keyboard.
There's a small no-name bluetooth GPS. With a AAA nimh battery, sirfstar chipset and USB port/charger, it works with the laptop as a wired device and doesn't require its own charger. I run GPS software on the phone when I need a portable display. Larger gps units have proven quite redundant and not worth the weight and hassle -- if there are good road maps for an area I just print them and take the small unit.
Back at the hotel/apt/office, there's a battery-powered HP Deskjet 450. It's probably the biggest compromise weight-to-value-wise, but for longer gigs I would not go without it. If I bring it, the power supply is similar to those for Thinkpads & doubles as a back-up for the laptop. (This does not work with the newer T60/similar.) The newer DJ460 is even smaller.
A Canon TX1. This usually stays in the bag until I need something very nice. 7mpix, image stabilization, HD video, and with a small mod (clipping the screen-closed shutoff button) it is unobtrusive enough for snapshots in military dictatorships. It also takes the same rechargeable battery as some older models, so replacements are available in remote places. It looks like a silver cigarette box unless you see the lens from the front. Walking across the border from Gaza, would I want to have the similar-function competitor from Sanyo (Xacti)? It looks like a pistol. 'Nuff said.
A Buffalo Airstation hi-power wifi card, and its matching folding 9dbi antenna. I have more wifi gear than you do, but am I gonna pack the 19dbi flat-panel everywhere? Thru customs? Puh-leez. This one fits in a jacket pocket, doesn't get a second look from security people, and it works well on win/linux/mac. *Someone* in the area will have an unsecured AP when you need it.
A Molskine pocket notebook and pen. For those 12-hour waits at the border, nowhere near a power outlet, while some underpaid socialist frontier guard holding your passport is waiting for a fax from the consulate to determine whether you're CIA or not.
Just my $0.02.
It will be the platform for all future updates, and Windows Update will nag you silly until you install it.
Huh... That's odd. I haven't seen a Windows Update nag since I installed Ubuntu last year and put Windows in VM, where it belongs.
Nobody is putting off releasing software, migrating systems, or so on until Windows 7 comes around. While they do that, their whole business will suffer. [...] 3-5 months, maybe. 16 months- you're out of your mind.
Read it and weep, Hot Stuff: Consumers are buying what's shoved at them , but even arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080106-despite-problems-consumers-choosing-vista-over-xp.html says (and references more solid data) that they're not necessarily *running* it, and 70% of small businesses are sticking with XP when purchasing new systems. What exactly are they suffering from, aside from saving a little money and getting a little better performance? What fools are releasing Vista-only software with a 1/3 adoption rate in your own platform base after a year? Yep, someone's suffering, but it ain't the folks waiting to see what shakes out.
I was surprised when Microsoft announced that Windows 7 (successor to Vista) will probably be out in about 16 months. Seems like they're stealing their own whimpery thunder re Vista. The release of SP1 for Vista is surely a relief for those who already adopted it, but what about the masses who were waiting for SP1 --- the proverbial "We'll wait for the bugs to be worked out" crowd?
All those folks (including my own org) are now looking at VistaSP1 vs W7 and wondering about the wisdom of adopting Vista at all. If W7 comes out mid-next year, and there's a W7SP1 about a year later... That means right now that Vista offers barely more than a two-year period of stable operation for an entire platform change. With XP still chugging along merrily (with better stability and lower HW expense/requirements) I really don't see the value for any but the smallest organization.
I ordered two -- in the first hour of the first day of the promotion -- to be shipped to my house in the US. As of today, I have nothing. No laptops, no email, no nuthin.' I phoned and confirmed that my order number does exist and indeed I have been charged for both the laptops (in November) and $50 for shipping (the day after Christmas).
But it's not the lack of laptops that's turning me from an interested and cheerful donor, to mild annoyance when it didn't show up before Christmas, to contemplating reversing the charges. It's the lack of information. Sure, there are delays. Sure, there are priorities for getting big shipments out to major educational recipients. But I gave these folks $850, and I don't even get the courtesy of a *status* message?
According to the schedule, mine should have showed up a month ago -- at the absolute latest. Before Christmas. I made the mistake of telling my kids about it, thinking I would teach them something about partnerships and donations, etc etc, and that's my own fault. But *still* even after phone calls and tracing and corrections... when I check the laptopgiving.org page, it tells me the order number is invalid, and that my email address is not found.
The kicker is that I work for a UN agency that manages large refugee aid programs, and I had to borrow an OLPC from a friend to show it to the Education & IT department directors. They're very interested in the OLPC, as it fits some of the educational needs pretty nicely. What am I going to tell these guys when they ask whether the project is well-run, has decent governance, and can deliver?
Sheesh.
-Jon
"what good is a file system if you can't write to it?"
I could say the same of NTFS. After throwing in the towel with regard to Windows as a base OS, I have years of accumulated data on NTFS volumes spread across a small pile of drives. Linux support for NTFS is still a little shaky. But with read-only access to NTFS, I can throw those old desktop or laptop drives into an enclosure, connect it, and either pull all the data over to a writable volume for ongoing work (and perhaps dispose of the old drive), or pick out individual pieces of data I want without worry of corrupting the volume.
How does this apply to ZFS? Not sure, since "piles of old data" isn't a likely scenario on ZFS. But I can imagine accessing shared NAS/SAN ZFS volumes with only one system managing dynamic allocation... or perhaps ZFS in place of ISO9660 to speed up large software installations?
ok, i appreciate the true geekitude of taping your fingers with reflective stuff to air-type, but editing the video to 4:04 is just over the top nerdiness.
damn.
If Galileo's telescope launched itself, went to Jupiter, circled the moons, took pictures, calculated anomalies (=decided what was mathematically interesting), and corrected its own course and adjusted its own eyepiece to take even more detailed pictures and then sent them back for another researcher to analyze, then yes.
If you read http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/ it's notable that Cassini is a nuclear-powered robot that processes data "in situ" from remote and direct sensing equipment. It's not just a remote-control telescope; it navigates independently (by command, not direct control) and several of the instruments pre-process data and *decide* what's worth looking at prior to data transmission. If the robot sends data and a request to look at some cool anomaly, is the person receiving the message a discoverer?
So the folks at Boulder announced it, but did they really discover it? Cassini's a pretty sophisticated robot and did all of the observation and a lot of the discerning and differentiation work, so when do we start to give credit where credit is due? It's now generally accepted that Rosalind Franklin was one of the primary discoverers of DNA (Watson's petty and dismissive BS aside), so why is this so different? A robot discovered this (former) moon, not a human. Do we name it after Cassini?
Just a thought.
This is the sort of morally right but legally wrong (in some places) service that ought to move into an anonymously-hosted service such as Freenet. There are several caveats to this tho -- it only works for a community-supported decentralized project, it's harder to maintain, and it's a tacit admission that the activities are impermissible in some locales. On the other hand, there are some things -- works of art in public domain, classic texts, referential materials, unpopular political speech, and the like -- that ought to have a safe haven.
/ought/ to be free (libre) can be posted and retrieved by all, but not pushed on anyone, not traced to anyone, and not deletable. Unfortunately there are certain commercial entities (not all -- I'm not anti-captialist) that have made a mockery of IP laws in the US And EU, and they have considerable influence. A while back, I saw a political sticker with a skull and crossbones, with the line "Voting is not the only answer" under it. While that's a little extreme, there is a time for civil disobedience, and a mode for using technology to simply override the restrictions of those who are morally wrong. A purely legal fight may take decades or even lifetimes, so sometimes it's better & faster to just destroy a bad business model that has societally-destructive effects by technical means, if not proper ones.
What kind of safe haven? Safe where information that
Also (and I know this will come up), no, Freenet and Tor are not nests of pedophiles where sheet music is lost in the filth. Yes, there are unfortunately visible and inevitable misusers of anonymous networks, but whatever the trolls might say, pictures do not cause abuse (and as this week's events demonstrate, there are very positive effects to abusers clickitying their i-thought-it-was-distorted faces on teh intarwebs). On the other hand, freedom to inform does cause aid to come to those who need it in a political/refugee sense, and freedom to share does further the cause of art and literature in a locked-away-text or book-burning sense. I continue to support these anonymous networks for the same reason I would not demand that we have a crime-free neighborhood before coming to the aid of those who need safe harbor in a more immediate sense.
Yes, it's been requested of the OOo team quite a few times over the past 4-5 years. ODF intuitively matches this concept, but implementing it apparently requires some nontrivial change to the Writer codebase. And a little more enthusiasm by those who could code it (wish I could). If I could direct my OOo donation to this one feature, I'd give $XXX instead of my paltry $XX donation. There's some background available here: http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/category/writing
J
Every release -- even a small point release like this one -- I hope that the OOo developers will add an outline mode to Writer. And every release I'm disappointed. I really like OOo, but this one missing feature keeps me from using it for serious work becuase it makes large document planning and writing production in Writer sloooooow.
And before some n00b who's never written a 200-page document jumps all over me: No, the OOo "Navigator" does not provide an outline mode. It provides something akin to a re-organizable TOC in a floating window, but it doesn't provide the productivity enhancements afforded by inline hierarchical control within the editing window. This is one function that MS Word got right. For example, in Word I can start typing and make a list in normal text, click into "outline mode" and either use a key shortcut or a single click-drag to promote/demote some text to headings (while leaving other items as content), or re-order paragraphs of text or headings. To do the same thing in OOo's Navigator, I need to switch to a different window to reorganize headings, but switch back to the editing window to resume editing content. I also need to switch between two windows to split a heading into two sections, switch back to move it, and switch again to resume composing content -- something I can do with a CR and single mouse-drag in Word.
Word: type, type, drag, type, type, [enter], key-combo, type.
OOo: type, type, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type, type, re-style, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type.
Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right! Or do it one-better and improve on the similar inline hierarchical editing from FrameMaker+SGML. Or innovate some collapsible tag interface from something like the old HotMeTaL from SoftQuad. (But don't trash the Navigator; it *is* useful for final proofing, just not composition)
-J
If, as you say, "I don't even think I understand what the hell you're talking about," then what good can come of putting your fingers on the keyboard? If you'd paused for a moment of thought before posting this knee-jerk Microsoft apologist tripe, you would see I'm not criticizing IIS directly -- only how it's used, and how that affects measurements of market share (which is the topic of TFA, if you had only read it).
Your statement "This study only counts active, stable web servers on the actual Internet, not copies installed on a laptop for use on a WAN" belies your misunderstanding. These aren't hidden copies. A great majority of these remote single-user systems look to all the world to be public webservers, with public entry pages, with major applications behind them. Netcraft can't distinguish between these empty-calorie 1-user webservers and, say, the front end for a major e-commerce site.
The experience regarding the MS consulting architects (the story you blew thru) indicates that this is not an anomaly; that it's becoming quite common for massive numbers of low-end poorly-designed but publicly-exposed systems to have IIS thrown into the mix. In this context, through no fault of the quality of IIS, saying that IIS is "gaining market share" because of server numbers is meaningless.
Quite separately, I'm of the personal opinion that IIS is crap.
Even accounting for the GoDaddy domain-parking nonsense, there's not much to these numbers. An IIS server is not equal to an Apache server in any way, shape or form. It would be like saying there are more IIS bicycles on the road than Apache locomotives, so therefore IIS is more important to the transport of people or goods. It's demonstrably bunk. While quantitative evidence is out there regarding applications and numbers of users per server, I think the following anecdotal bit sums it up nicely.
.NET. And it's a BIG pile.
.NET application on the old client-server app, but the network chatter was 20x the capacity of the network because the MS-trained app architects could not wrap their heads around the idea of a constrained WAN. What used to be a small record lookup and update of about 300k over the wire turned into more than 6MB of inter-domain line noise.
...BLINK... BLINK... don't seem to recognize there's even an issue.
.NET mess for purposes it's clearly incapable of serving and that even Apache would be no good for . Just my subjective opinion, but I don't think anyone would ever do this with Apache. The result is that a single project -- an abject failure of a bad design from every meaningful metric, and the willful ignorance of user requirements in favor of vendor fantasies -- shows up on a webserver market share survey as a several-thousand-instance win for MS. By all indication from MS consultants, this is not a unique event.
In a very large quasi-governmental organization, we have a major application that runs on a handful of Oracle systems and serves double-digit thousands of people with acceptable performance over the last half dozen years. There is an ill-thought-out project underway (a year into development) to replace this with a steaming pile of
How big? Follow me on this one: First they modeled the
Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app. Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.
The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks
So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the
In the immortal words of Stan Lee: 'Nuff said.
Bullshit. Bull. Shit. Just because there's a growing ocean of (mis)information and lots of tools to search through the disorganized mess doesn't mean that being lazy is ok, or that taxonomy has lost its usefulness. The same goes for txt-ing fools and 1337-speak d00dz; just because you can doesn't mean you should. (Or that your misapplied, sloppy comunicashunz skilz are worthy of respect.)
I lead teams of consultants giving advice about information to big organizations (big whoop, but it's usually the personal kind, like medical or financial data that might be personally damaging or hurtful if disclosed). Half the time this work takes the form of technology advice, but just as often it's process and governance advising that borders on legal advice. If I or any of these guys crib an opinion from the Intarwebs, we will be busted. If citations are not properly given, we will be busted. If we don't express a complete chain of reasoning that supports each and every considered opinion, we will be busted. You get the idea. Anything less is disrespectful to the people who pay us good money for finding information, considering it, and making decisions about it. It's exactly the kind of thing for which a term paper is good practice.
The same goes for presentations, articles, books, proposals, sales agreements, and even resumes. If you want to establish a fact, convince someone of a position, or persuade someone else to help you, you *must* be able to express a structured, supported opinion, and know the difference between verbatim quotes, derived ideas, and the rare original thought.
Writing is as important as it ever has been.
Research is as important as it ever has been.
And reasoning is even more important.
I'm sure as hell teaching *my* kids how to do term papers, because I do one for every client every couple of weeks. Some of it may be formulaic drivel, but some of it is really enjoyable stuff worthy of some professional pride. If the unwashed masses don't want to practice for nice jobs in the real world, then fine. Ditch the term papers. And have fun sorting my mail down in the mailroom aspiring to a first-level helpdesk gig, or painting my garage.
J
Aside from the obvious suggestion to simply delete it all -- which amounts to saying I should not read up on my own industry while I'm in the hotel each night on the road -- what are some good cross-platform solutions for encrypting whole sets of data?
Inquiring minds want to know, and google turns up either too much or too little with my fat fingers. At this point, when I'm travelling to places where I might be hassled on my return, I'm tending towards a dummy Windows installation on C: with an an obfuscated and encrypted set of VMware images on a VFAT partition that I load using a bootable CD with Knoppix. Not the best (it keeps the TSA drones at bay) but I'm interested in more elegant and simple solutions.
-J
"Should parents tell their kids before they monitor?"
m mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9003519
Umm, can I have a "Hell yeah"??? I just wrote an article on Computerworld (blatant plug) about what a terrible idea it is to be secretive about this sort of thing with your kids. When they figure out you're using filters, router logs and keyloggers, and lying about it, they won't ever trust you again. Ever. Even with a $20 bill. And they might even write you off as a perv and cut off communications. (I had one moderately well-known figure in IT Security admit to me this weekend that he'd secretly installed keylogger software on his tech-savvy kid's computer when he started to use an encrypted proxy for private conversations with his girlfriend. What a positively boneheaded move -- I wonder how that'll turn out in a few years.)
Anyway, there's some quotes of people wiser than I in the following "Back to School" article -- http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
-Jon
It's shameless self-promotion, but I just wrote an article on computerworld about basic security and privacy issues for the homeless and/or other perennially wandering folks. There's a little coverage about identity establishment there too, along with general protection of information and resources.
-Jon
My old security consultancy was assimilated by Symantec. Our technological and biological distinctiveness was added to their own. Our individuality was irrelevant. We didn't even get to keep a sub-brand ("@stake, a Symantec Company") like Norton did. Now we're lost in the homogeneous blob. Of course, that was a now-obvious screw-up, because the sales people still say things like "our professional services staff is based on the expertise of @stake..." It's great for little yellow boxes of product, but two years on, the Symantec name still doesn't stand on its own with respect to security consulting. Not when commissions depend on it.
The people at McAfee/NA were a bit brighter about it, and the value of the Foundstone name and reputation wasn't squandered as badly as it could have been when they got bought out. Sure Foundstone shed people just as @stake did, but there's a world of difference. They decided to follow perceived distinctiveness as a tool for selling consulting, and perceived ubiquity as a tool to sell products; the names differentiate them.
Good luck to RSA. I'm sure they'll keep the name, expand their consulting services and probably give us a hell of a run for our money. (What with EMC already competing with Veritas/Symantec...) It's gonna be an interesting time.
J
*Best line this week: "If you're happy and you know it, stick with your current dosage."
Good. More jobs for me, and with a little work, my kids. (Ok, it's a lot of work, including reading to my kids 30-45 minutes a day, and the older one (6) is transitioning to reading to us. But I digress.)
Seriously, not everyone can be a rocket scientist. Some folks have to take less mentally-strenuous jobs, and the upside to that is that it takes less education and effort to get a job that focuses on rote process or repetitive simple problem-solving. Of course, there's the whole unfairness issue relating to people who work in jobs that are physically or emotionally draining for shit pay, but that's not the issue here. It used to be that motivated people could rise to hit the maximum vocation that their formal or self education allowed. Now it seems that educated people sink to the vocational level that their self motivation and application of that education allows. Same effect, no?
My brother, for example, is an overeducated undermotivated weenie who's dumbed himself down with IM-speak, and wonders why he's not an appealing job candidate. But that brings up an interesting issue: I don't think that the deterioration of language skills can be examined in a vacuum. What about the deterioration of social skills that seems to accompany the IM-speak txting crap? IM/TXT communciations involve effects from reduced level of effort, lack of persistence, reduced affect, and perceived levels of anonymity.
All I have is anecdotal evidence, but the idea of sending thank-you letters, participating in professional societies, and writing articles for review by your peers seems totally alien to that crowd. And I don't mean to be stuck-up about that. An article for your peers might be a well-written blog entry or a political rant in email, not necessarily an academic paper. >>>> My point is that if you notice that people are sharing soundbites instead of whole ideas, then it makes sense to take a look at the mode of sharing, not just the sound-bite vs whole-idea issue.
Jon
two words: Board chow.
http://www.inktank.com/images/AT/cartoons/04-04-01 .gif
-J
Symantec has been told by the Feds to stop exporting LC5? Oh, the horror. Except it's horseshit. I was part of Symantec's aquisition of @stake, and if the Feds have anything to do with this, it's far and away a secondary reason for the restriction.
:) Similarly, they were so terrified of @stake's WebProxy (imho the best app for web app security assessment/pentest) that they deep-sixed it so far that many product and services sales droids were told to deny its existence.
The truth of the matter is that Sym's Legal dept is terrified of LC5, and this is a convenient excuse if it's true at all. Just as they were frightened by the liability and publicity implications of @stake's decompilation and automated app security checking tool, and are "spinning it off." God forbid someone runs that tool against one of their own products. (Not that it's happened.
It's a damn shame. These were great tools. I wonder if it's better to have them die suddenly, than go the Norton route of slow deterioration and bloat...? Criminy, it's only been 14 months since the @stake aquisition, and from what I know since departing there are no products left from @stake and a very small percentage of the @stake staff left. Not a very well-managed investment, if you ask me.
J
Awfergodsake... Batman can have nipples that could cut glass on his costume (not to mention the whole matching Robin homoerotic costumerie), the Mystique character from x-men can crawl across the screen buck-ass nekkid but for a few well-placed scaly-things, and even the Spy Kids characters have proto-breasts and pouches to stimulate the (hopefully) 12-year old pervs in the audience. And I'm still scrubbing my brain from watching the characters in Lost in Space.
And Superman can't appear too male. Jebus. I'm not in favor of having a super-dong waved in my kid's face on the big screen, but come on, the bar is pretty low these days. This is the least of my worries.
"Those who have studied the controversial use of dolphins in the U.S. defence programme claim it is vital they are caught quickly
Or what?
They're gonna go back to the sea, tell their brethren about what worthless abusive slobs we are, teach them some new tool-using concepts, and launch a revolution? Absurd, yes, but if we're still training animals to do our military dirty work these days, with exotic weapons no less -- and most of our military actions are motivated by unfathomable political stupidity and testosterone-poisoning -- we've all richly earned such an obtuse end.
I say more power to 'em, goddamit. Next time you see me rowing out and dumping bags full of rubber-handled tools (easy to grip w/teeth), supplies, and beer into the ocean, you'll know what I'm up to.
J