Re:1.86 Billion Dollars? Whooo ha ha ha haaaa!
on
The Art of Deception
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· Score: 2
Um, there hasn't been any real riverboat gambling on the Mississippi for about, oh, 120 years. Which means that the events described occured in about the year 1860. If Duoval actually took 40 million USD in gambling winnings in 1860, that would equate to at least 500 million USD today. No connection to Mitnick as far as that goes.
Although on the Mitnick side I thought the prosecution was a bit unfounded, tresspassing and theft of service are crimes regardless of how they are committed.
sPh
Reminds me of "40 Years a Gambler..."
on
The Art of Deception
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Reminds me of _40 Years a Gambler on the Mississippi_ by Duevol. Did such a person exist? There is evidence that he did. Was he a great gambler and con artist? Contemporary records indicate he was. Did he actually do any of the things that he described in his book? Given (a) and (b), probably.
Now the key question: how much can you believe of what you read in the book? Well, about as much as you should believe coming from a man who obtained millions of dollars (1860 millions!) by lying, cheating, and swindling.
Grace Hopper did fundamental work in the creation of the assembler and the compiler, creating the concept of "programming" and increasing the prodctivity of software creation by true orders of magnitude (unless you are one of those who prefer to do their programming in machine language, in which case the invention of the complier was a bad thing!).
Not only that we don't know yet what OS they will work with. So lets not start doomsaying until the first of these are out and there is proof they refuse to run certain operating systems.
Well, the problem is that the "embrace and extend" and "stealth networking" marketing techniques use the time when the victim, I mean the consumer and compeititon, is waiting to see what happens to lock everything in place and preempt any other course of action. So that may not be the best approach in this case.
While I sympathize with your viewpoint, the problem is that Win98 and NT 4.0 are going end of life on June 30, 2003. Microsoft might decide to release some security-related patches after that date, but they are by no means obligated to do so. So it is a bit unclear what the poster will be patching in the future.
Looks interesting, but how is this different from the document management systems that were popular in the 1985-1995 time period? e.g. SoftSolutions, PCDocs, etc? SoftSolutions in particular replaced the Save As dialogue (in Windows 3.1) with a metadata-based dialogue. Is the difference that the older systems used a restricted set of descriptors, and therefore required advanced setup?
The Salon article is clearly meant to be a parody of year end predictions, but the scary thing is I see no reason why Prediction #1 won't actually occur. Should the TIA database be created as advertised, the temptation to use it for politial ends will be tremendous. And we all know how stong politicians are at resisting temptation.
The 19 December 2002 Aviation Week (subscription only though so you will have to go to the library {"what's a library, grandpa?"} to read it) has an article making a very similar point - it even mentions some of the ideas you propose. The theme of the article was that although some of these ideas may turn out to be unworkable, something must be done to revive creativity in aircraft/airliner design.
What keeps our society going is that the bean counters own stock (as do lots of other people)Boeing answers to the bean counters and must show an EXPECTED return on any project.
That's a meme that the bean counters have worked very hard to instill in American business, with quite a bit of success I must say.
The problem is that history does not bear it out. Successful companies are built when risk-takers (i) come up with good ideas (ii) implement those ideas they way they think is right, regardless of what the spreadsheets say. See the history of General Electric, du Pont, DEC, Microsoft, etc.
Typically those companies start to die when the bean counters arrive and formalize everything with "rate of return" studies. See DEC for the the most extreme example of such a process, and consider that there could never have been a "rate of return" study for Ford Motor Company, since the market Henry Ford wanted to serve did not exist before his company created it.
So what exactly IS Boeing's business strategy for commercial airliners? Do they plan to just give up competing with Airbus, take replacement orders from airlines that are so invested in Boeing they have no other choice, and slowly let the commerical business die away? Or do they have some secret plan (a blended-wing-body design perhaps) dramatic enough to break them out of their current rut, and are just waiting for the right time to announce it? Cause the way Boeing is going they won't be a factor in commercial sales in 5-7 years.
sPh
Re:Information value
on
Smart Mobs
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Reed's Law, which states that, for a network where members of the network can form groups within the network, the value of that network will grow exponentially....web logs are proof of this
This is shit. Utter shit. Not just the web log link, but the law - think about it. Imagine 1 person joining Slashdot. According to this law, he will make more difference to the value of the site than any person before him. This also applies to nodes in a network, clearly.
I too would need to see some more concrete proof. Pretty much all recent research on business decision-making shows that a knowledgable person makes better decisions than a small committee, and a small committee makes MUCH better decisions than a large committee. My experience in work, volunteer organizations, and life in general bears this out.
The so-called network or weblog effects would seem to be nothing but committees expanded to the size of the on-line population. Which would also tend to imply that the quality of decisions reached by such methods would be mediocre at best.
I thought we were against digitized cops with access to all our private data.
If one takes Lord of the Flies or, perhaps more formally, Leviathan seriously, then even a strict freedeom / privacy zealot will admit that there must be some amount of government and policing.
The questions are: (i) how much (i) who controls the amount (iii) who guards the guardians?
Experience shows that, while it can be subject to abuse, answering those questions locally is the best way to ensure the maximum amount of freedom.
Sure, maybe Officer Bustem is getting a little out of hand with looking up data on his patrol car tablet. But I can always discuss the issue with my city council member, or even run for city council myself if I don't like the answers. Or I could reasonably move out of Smallville if the laws are ultimately not to my liking. But I have zero chance of influencing the Atty. General of the United States, and it would be very difficult to pick up and move out of the US of A.
So: the technology itself is good. It could be misused. But it is up to the citizens of that juristdiction to control their own fate.
I hear this theory every now and then, and it's just dead wrong. The fundamental problem is that a program is thousands of times more complex than a bridge. Imagine constructing a bridge out of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of custom-fabricated tiny parts that have to fit together exactly right or the whole thing collapses. That's the correct analogy.
Sort of like a skyscraper? Or a large jet airliner?
The problems people face have barely changed in thousands of years. The problems that business (which uses 95% of the software out there) faces haven't changed in 200 years.
Amen brother. Although I would question the 200 years a bit. I recently documented a bug in an ERP system that violated a fundamental rule of double-entry bookkeeping. Those rules were codifed by the Medici's in the 1500s!
I would have to seriously question the statement that Mr. Gabriel is "possibly the only person with a Ph.D in Computer Science and an MFA in poetry". Many computer people I have met have a lifelong fascination with language and literature. Particularly the academic types who pursue Ph.D's. I would guess that there are a fair number of people out there with that combination of degrees.
The Museum of Science and Industry model railroad has been around for many decades. It was "modernized" in the 1980s by the Santa Fe Railroad.
An entirely new model opened in November 2002. Reasonably complete models of the Chicago Loop, downtown Seattle, and operating territory in between. Pretty neat but I would like to know where the Santa Fe stainless fluting went?
You might want to take a look at the Society for Industrial Archeology. They sponser conferences and tours that do exactly this, as well as publishing several neat newsletters and journals.
The first comparison was, while still off the mark, more apt: driving an automatic is easier than driving a stick, and Windows 2000 is easier to set up, administer, and use than Linux.
Interesting comparison. I used to live in a densely populated area of Chicago, where parking was a nightmare to say the least. My friends and family used to ask me how I could bear to drive a stick shift car, since "parking is so much harder with a manual".
Well, it did take me about 6 months to learn how to parallel park smoothly. But - once I had learned, it was in fact much easier, because the clutch gives you an added dimension of control as you slip into a tight parking space. I got to the point where I could park the manual in a space 6" (15 cm) longer than the car. No one with an automatic trans could match that.
My experience with Windows products pretty much parallels (ha ha) this: easy to learn. Hard to administer.
While I'm only in my mid 20's and I'm no veteran by any stretch, it seems like there have been huge leaps in programmer productivity made possible by things like OOP and off-the-shelf components.
Hmmm. In 1980 we had ASK ManMan. Written in COBOL and FORTRAN. A full distribution (IIRC) was around 5 megabytes, which really put a strain on available storage. The function of ManMan was to provide accounting and manufacturing management support for manufacturing companies. It performed this function very well, and some orgs out there are still using the 1980s versions.
Today we have JDEdwards OneWorld. Written in C++ and other state-of-the-art tools. The distribution runs about 10 GB, with a working set for development purposes of 1.5 GB. Its function? To provide accounting and manufacturing management support for manufacturing companies. How well does it do? Is it any better than ManMan? I will leave that for you to decide. But hey - you can cut-and-paste directly from OneWorld to Excel. That's a gain I guess.
Print publications (in this industry anyway) are always 6-8 weeks out of date -- and that's a long, long time in the IT/Net fields.
Really? Could you provide some examples? Perhaps a list of things that substantial organizations (whether they be corporate, non-profit, governments, NGOs, whatever) are doing TODAY that they were not doing 8 weeks ago? Heck, I'll even give you 16 weeks.
If you have been around the information management world for a while, or read up a bit on its history, you will find that while the overall pace of change is reasonably fast (just as the pace of change in the power delivery market was fast in the 1880s), very little actually changes on a day-to-day basis.
Heck, in a large organization it can take 8 weeks to schedule a meeting on what changes to make to the web site. Sure, 10 years ago there was no web site. But 10 years is a much different time scale than 8 weeks.
Lake Michigan is of course so thick with Coast Guard (and Chicago Fire Dept, and Milwaukee Fire Dept etc.) helicopers and ships rescuing newbie and ocean sailors who think that [lake] == [easy sailing] that a submarine would be probably be run into the bottom in a matter of minutes!
You are assuming that the specific attacks on the DNS servers are being carried out by kids and "young dudes" working by themselves for the thrill of it.
Whereas these attacks, as well as some of the worms that have surfaced recently, strike me more as testing of new techniques and probing of defenses by an organized group that is working on techniques to cause widespread disruption.
That's bad, because the characters were the only thing keeping the series from sinking under the weight of the Tom-Clancy-in-the-2300s technobabble. Which is saying something considering Weber's strength with characterization (hint: sarcasm involved in that last sentence).
The first few Honors were pretty good - even my anti-tech spouse liked them. Then the Clancy-babble got louder and louder. Even I couldn't finish the last one, and I used to like technothrillers.
Hey, man, if all/some that shit happens, the last thing I am going to fscking care about is my backups. I think I will be glad if I am alive, and go from there...
Respectfully, I would have to disagree. The day after the earthquake (I live a bit too close to the New Madrid fault in central North America) you will of course be busy seeing to your family, helping neighbors, making living arrangements, etc.
But the day after the day after? People do survive disasters you know. Consider London during the Blitz - people lived and worked there throughout, actually increasing industrial production while the bombs fell around them. If you are a system administrator you have a responsibiity to your coworkers and fellow citizens to ensure that your organization can get back on its feet after a disaster, so people can get back to work and start to recover their lives and the economy in which they make their living.
Slashdot Mirror
Although on the Mitnick side I thought the prosecution was a bit unfounded, tresspassing and theft of service are crimes regardless of how they are committed.
sPh
Now the key question: how much can you believe of what you read in the book? Well, about as much as you should believe coming from a man who obtained millions of dollars (1860 millions!) by lying, cheating, and swindling.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
The problem is that history does not bear it out. Successful companies are built when risk-takers (i) come up with good ideas (ii) implement those ideas they way they think is right, regardless of what the spreadsheets say. See the history of General Electric, du Pont, DEC, Microsoft, etc.
Typically those companies start to die when the bean counters arrive and formalize everything with "rate of return" studies. See DEC for the the most extreme example of such a process, and consider that there could never have been a "rate of return" study for Ford Motor Company, since the market Henry Ford wanted to serve did not exist before his company created it.
sPh
sPh
The so-called network or weblog effects would seem to be nothing but committees expanded to the size of the on-line population. Which would also tend to imply that the quality of decisions reached by such methods would be mediocre at best.
sPh
The questions are: (i) how much (i) who controls the amount (iii) who guards the guardians?
Experience shows that, while it can be subject to abuse, answering those questions locally is the best way to ensure the maximum amount of freedom.
Sure, maybe Officer Bustem is getting a little out of hand with looking up data on his patrol car tablet. But I can always discuss the issue with my city council member, or even run for city council myself if I don't like the answers. Or I could reasonably move out of Smallville if the laws are ultimately not to my liking. But I have zero chance of influencing the Atty. General of the United States, and it would be very difficult to pick up and move out of the US of A.
So: the technology itself is good. It could be misused. But it is up to the citizens of that juristdiction to control their own fate.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
Well, it did take me about 6 months to learn how to parallel park smoothly. But - once I had learned, it was in fact much easier, because the clutch gives you an added dimension of control as you slip into a tight parking space. I got to the point where I could park the manual in a space 6" (15 cm) longer than the car. No one with an automatic trans could match that.
My experience with Windows products pretty much parallels (ha ha) this: easy to learn. Hard to administer.
sPh
Today we have JDEdwards OneWorld. Written in C++ and other state-of-the-art tools. The distribution runs about 10 GB, with a working set for development purposes of 1.5 GB. Its function? To provide accounting and manufacturing management support for manufacturing companies. How well does it do? Is it any better than ManMan? I will leave that for you to decide. But hey - you can cut-and-paste directly from OneWorld to Excel. That's a gain I guess.
sPh
If you have been around the information management world for a while, or read up a bit on its history, you will find that while the overall pace of change is reasonably fast (just as the pace of change in the power delivery market was fast in the 1880s), very little actually changes on a day-to-day basis.
Heck, in a large organization it can take 8 weeks to schedule a meeting on what changes to make to the web site. Sure, 10 years ago there was no web site. But 10 years is a much different time scale than 8 weeks.
sPh
But I especially like this part:Lake Michigan is of course so thick with Coast Guard (and Chicago Fire Dept, and Milwaukee Fire Dept etc.) helicopers and ships rescuing newbie and ocean sailors who think that [lake] == [easy sailing] that a submarine would be probably be run into the bottom in a matter of minutes!
sPh
Whereas these attacks, as well as some of the worms that have surfaced recently, strike me more as testing of new techniques and probing of defenses by an organized group that is working on techniques to cause widespread disruption.
sPh
The first few Honors were pretty good - even my anti-tech spouse liked them. Then the Clancy-babble got louder and louder. Even I couldn't finish the last one, and I used to like technothrillers.
sPh
But the day after the day after? People do survive disasters you know. Consider London during the Blitz - people lived and worked there throughout, actually increasing industrial production while the bombs fell around them. If you are a system administrator you have a responsibiity to your coworkers and fellow citizens to ensure that your organization can get back on its feet after a disaster, so people can get back to work and start to recover their lives and the economy in which they make their living.
sPh