Why is it you are so comfortable using an external program to access gmail, but insist a web browser be used for a router?
I explained already, depending on the type of device you're using, a commandline interface may take a very long time to use.
Picture trying to use vi to edit network settings config files with a standard (numeric only) phone keyboard. If you just have to fix the IP address, you'll get it done a lot faster from a web browser.
Email is much different, in that it's something people use often and in complex ways. The user interface a dedicated client can offer is much more complete, better performing and has less latency than what a web application can offer. Using a web app has security implications too, for instance there's no way gmail can securely implement GPG signatures. It could be done with a plugin, but then I need an external application already.
It additionally functions just as bad as it always did without js active.
My preferred form of browsing is nested mode, reading pretty much the whole page from top to bottom. With the dynamic interface I simply ended up clicking "more" and lowering the threshold, until getting the equivalent result, except in 20 clicks instead of one.
From my POV, nested mode with threshold set to 1, loading the maximum amount of comments possible per page is precisely what I want, and the dynamic mode adds a lot of inconvenience. Dynamic mode also instantly breaks when I load slashdot pages for reading on the underground, where I don't have an internet connection.
My ideal version of slashdot would come with a NNTP gateway, so that I could read offline, with zero latency, use a better editor than the browser's text area, and queue replies to be sent when I get out of the train. Then the phone would just need a newsreader and I'd get a much better and lower bandwidth interface.
And it's most annoying feature when I check it from a phone is not the JS, but the CSS positioned karma slider. Though maybe CSS also represents a bad technology that should be disabled too.
CSS is precisely the right technology, which allows to separate content from presentation. It's precisely the thing to allow the page to display in formats optimized for computer viewing, phone viewing, printing, disabilities, etc, without having to change the code.
Unfortunately these days it's often used to add pointless decoration.
Stopping dumping tons of crap into the atmosphere is unlikely to make things worse. Now trying to fix things by releasing some other chemical to try to balance the problem could backfire.
The first is like "Shouldn't we understand the complete ecosystem of the lake before we stop using it as a garbage dump?". It's generally unnecessary to wait to have a 100% complete understanding. Maybe the fish are dying for some other reason, but stopping dumping junk is unlikely to make things get any worse.
The second is more like "The lake seems too acid, maybe we should compensate by dumping several tons of base to neutralize". Now this kind of solution will require a complete understanding, lest it turns out that wasn't the problem, and things become even worse than before.
I thought emergency remote access (e.g. from a phone) was what ssh was for.
That's with a full keyboard, but plenty phones can render HTML competently and have a standard keyboard. SSH is certainly technically possible, but a pain.
the realtime traffic chart in tomato is simply amazing, and is the type of thing impossible in a situation as you mention.
It's a nice gimmick I guess, but I'd rather have it come preconfigured for easy interfacing with Cacti, then I can make my own, better graphs.
I think Gmail makes webmail great, and the non Web 2.0 webmails suck, but just as I wouldn't use a web interface to a router on a phone (ssh for that), I wouldn't use a web interface to e-mail on a phone either (e-mail client for that).
Meh, I much prefer Mutt and KMail.
Though I dislike anything on the web that requires JavaScript to work. I've got the annoying slashdot junk disabled, and I have a gmail account, but it's redirected to my IMAP server, and I never actually log into the web interface.
In practice, I just checked my mail on my phone, saw a slashdot reply notification, and clicked the link. Then stared at the screen in disbelief, as the phone showed me that to show me a message maybe 2KB in size it had to download 1MB worth of crap.
Reloading the page is something that takes a very small fraction of a second, when the server isn't doing any heavy lifting, and the page doesn't have half a megabyte of javascript.
And a much larger amount of devices can show that simple page. The router interface shouldn't be flashy. It should be neat and simple, something you could deal with from a cell phone if it was needed in an emergency. I can't tell you how much I hate the websites of various device manufacturers that require hunting the link for the drivers download in the source, because the only available browser I had was lynx, and the link is impossible to find in it.
IMO, don't bother with the flashy stuff. I'll be the one who is going to mess with the router settings, and I want it stable, functional, and usable on all devices. If it prefers form over function I'll go with another product.
These days it's cesspit, but during its best days it was a site where users published long, well thought, and often technical articles about interesting subjects, some of which had effect beyond the website. For instance, Opennic (alternative root DNS servers) got started at an article on K5. Users submitted stories, and other users offered criticism during an editing period and collectively approved or rejected the story.
See for example a few links in the hall of fame to see what it used to be like.
I'd really like to find another place like that, its degeneration was very unfortunate.
My understanding of the term is that the term "solution" is supposed to apply to things that satisfy a need in a way that goes beyond the simple delivery of hardware of CDs.
For instance, if you need a quad core server with 32GB RAM, that's a product you go and buy.
If however you've determined you need a document management system, you could do that yourself, or you could go with a "solution", meaning you go to some company like say, Ricoh, and say "We need a document management system". And they give you a multifunction printer that can print and scan documents, a file server, software for the file server, software to manage scanned documents, and so on. Then they come to your company, hook all that stuff up, test it, teach you how to tell the system that faxes coming from this number should be automatically filed in this folder, and so on.
You could individually purchase and configure all the individual components, and maybe have a programer hack something up in PHP or VB, but then you have to be sure you have somebody who understands how to set that up. And perhaps even your sysadmin is unwilling to do that, because he's the one tech in a 20 person company, and if it fails to work, he'll be personally blamed for the purcase of a ton of expensive hardware.
iPods seem a great deal more common than iPhones, but I see a pretty large variety of players on the underground. And pretty much any recent phone will make an acceptable MP3 player. My phone for instance accepts 8GB cards, which would make it quite acceptable. I still prefer my dedicated player though.
Back when the term "multimedia" started to be heavily used in relation to computers, the meaning was roughly "The same stuff as usual, except with mostly pointless sound and video attached". This seems to have mostly started with the common availability of sound cards and CD drives.
So for instance a "multimedia encyclopedia" would come on a CD, and the revolutionary feature would be that you could listen to a MIDI of Beethoven's 5th from the article.
In the same way, a MMS is a text message with a photo or video attached. An email about how you spent your vacation doesn't stop containing text because you attach a few photos, right?
Standardization on mini-B? Or micro-B? Or the thing that's on most LG's right now? Or the thing that's on most Motorola's right now?
Wikipedia says: "The Micro-USB connector was announced by the USB-IF on January 4, 2007 and the Mini-USB connectors were withdrawn". So Micro-B then.
Though standarization on USB would be a great start. A mini to micro adapter can be made easily, and wouldn't require another cable that'd add to the tangled cabling mess in the backpack.
I'm just saying that, if I wanted to bet on availability of a given cable in any random place, I'd bet on being able to find the thing that plugs into the ubiquitous iPod.
In America maybe, but not in Europe. In Spain the only person I know who had an iPhone was a coworker, who complained it was a fancy looking piece of junk. My mother recently asked me what an iPhone *was* and she works in tourism. And I've seen them offered for 0 Euros, though I'm sure a high priced contract of some sort is attached. Considering her current contract is 10 Euros a month, and I vaguely remembered iPhones coming with $60/month contracts, she instantly lost interest.
Where have you seen an iPod dock connector on a device that doesn't plug into an Apple product?
For instance, my mini-B cable both fits my Cowon D2 music player, and my Canon photo camera. My Nokia phone unfortunately does have its own weird charging connector, but standarization should take care of that in a few years. And since it has full Bluetooth support, it's not really a problem as for anything other than charging I don't need a cable anyway.
SMS allows sending a few bytes of text. MMS allows sending images, sound, video and rich text.
Generally not very useful IMO, but can ocassionally come handy. For instance with my phone I could open the GPS app, make it calculate a route, save an image of the GPS display, and send that by MMS to somebody who is trying to find a place, but has no GPS on their phone.
I don't get what's not to like about a BT headset.
I've got a stereo one. It looks like a pair of headphones, except with no cable, and a little microphone that can be pulled out. It's got good sound quality, there's no way to get the wire get tangled with anything, I can simply remove it from my head and put it somewhere without again messing with the cable, and if I get a call I can hit a button and switch from the music to the cell phone.
That last part seemed unnecessary (I bought it for music), but it came really handy when I had to mess with the wiring in the rack. Phone rings, just one button press, and I can put the phone in my pocket and have both hands free to mess with the cabling, while continuing talking to the other tech. What's not to like?
The question we really should ask us isn't 'why is Japan so far ahead of us technologically', but rather 'why is Japan so far behind us in soft technologies?' You know, things like UI design, quality of life, etc?
No, the question we should ask us is precisely "why is Japan so far ahead of us technologically". I want to know why they can have all that fancy stuff on their phones, and I can't. The question "why is Japan so far behind us in soft technologies?" is not for us, but for Japan. It's their problem, so it's them who should think about it. Why waste time on thinking why somebody else has a problem you don't?
Then for example the Ishar and Eye of Beholder games are FPSes too?
True, they are from a "first person" perspective, but the gameplay is nothing alike.
In Ishar and EOB for instance, the concept of having to shoot at a target with precision is completely inexistent. You have a sword equipped, you click the sword icon, the character swings the sword, and the hit or miss is determined by a virtual dice roll. Being successful at Ishar 3 is a completely different skill as being successful at Quake 3, and mostly a matter of long term thinking, correct selection of equipment, using the right spells, doing the right thing at the right time, etc. The insane reflexes needed in Quake 3 to run and shoot precisely the instant an enemy appears are of absolutely no help.
Shooting gallery games also are nothing alike a FPS. They invoke different emotions even. In a shooting gallery you normally can't retreat, can't run away and hide behind a corner, can't run after a wounded enemy, can't have a battle between snipers, or to snipe targets from large distances, etc. Shooting galleries are very linear, and things like several people running around like crazy and shooting missiles at each other are inexistent.
Pin not needed. I thought this sounded awfully thick. Wikipedia says:
The thickness of paper is often measured by the caliper, which is typically given in thousandths of an inch[4]. Paper may be between 0.07 millimetres (0.0028 in) and 0.18 millimetres (0.0071 in) thick[5].
Most of them of course lack a deep understanding, but that's not really what I'm talking about.
The various grandmas and aunts people like to refer to, who are hopelessly confused if you move around the icons on their desktop or change the colors *are* shrinking. Those people who base their usage of a computer on memorization of steps (click here, click there) and become lost when something unexpected happens are disappearing.
Today's teenagers are perfectly proficent at using various programs without having to follow a fixed list of steps, and can figure out how to use a new program by themselves. They might not be geniuses, but they should have enough intelligence to figure out the generic concept of "word processor" and how to adapt to one with a slightly different interface.
It's just like people who thought moving vehicles must have been created with the help of Satan, because they couldn't conceivably understand how such a thing was possible, eventually died out to be replaced with people who don't think there's anything strange about a modern car. Most people don't understand the mechanics in deep detail, but aren't afraid of it, and don't think it runs on black magic, unlike their ancestors.
Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if it got into the DSM in a few years.
After all what's considered a psychological problem and not varied a lot over time. Not so long ago, being left handed was a problem to be fixed, and women had hysteria. I'm pretty sure those things appeared in some medical manual back then, and now they probably don't. Freud had also a lot of weird theories that before his time didn't exist, then started existing, then went on to be considered as bullshit.
So really, all it takes is enough doctors to agree on that homophobia is a psychological problem, and it'll start appearing in medical texts.
The very idea that it's possible to have a conversation with somebody on the other side of the globe also blows some people's minds, I bet.
But those people are old and (no offense intended) will eventually die. Today most teenagers would probably fail to understand your attempts to explain how mindblowing a cell phone is compared to what things were like 50 years ago, as it's a completely normal thing that always was there for them.
The number of people who think a computer is a magical and impossible to understand device is steadily shrinking, as they're replaced by people who grew up with computers and don't see anything particularly strange about them. And those people who really don't know how to use a computer aren't using Windows because it's magic in any way, it's simply because that's what other people use. If more knowledgeable people switch, so will they.
It might work with smaller projects. But the kernel has had thousands of contributors, some of which won't sell for any price, some that can't be found anymore and some that are now dead. Just figuring out who holds the copyright over which parts of files patched by 50 different people over its existence would be a nightmare.
Then there are tricky questions. Such as, who owns the copyright for a line where the first contributor did the general concept, the second patched the off by one error, and the third added a check for the return value? How much must a block of code change to determine that the original author's code is now gone if it retains the functionality?
Re:looks like it still loses history
on
BASH 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Precisely what I'm saying. The grandparent is a "security analyst" complaining about the.bash_history file being incomplete. I'm asking, even if it was complete, it's ultimately under the user's control, so how could you trust its contents, given so many ways to mess with it?
Re:looks like it still loses history
on
BASH 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
For security, how can you trust user controlled files?
It's easy to mess with the history file. I could "ln -sf/dev/null.bashrc". I could start any text editor, like vi, open the file from inside it, and remove incriminating lines. I could strategically use the history bug and make sure that the lines I want are overwritten.
A more interesting option is uploading a program that contains a function that messes with the history file, or even its own shell.
The only way you can trust logged commands if the logging was performed outside the user's control, and the user had no way to evade it.
Slashdot Mirror
I explained already, depending on the type of device you're using, a commandline interface may take a very long time to use.
Picture trying to use vi to edit network settings config files with a standard (numeric only) phone keyboard. If you just have to fix the IP address, you'll get it done a lot faster from a web browser.
Email is much different, in that it's something people use often and in complex ways. The user interface a dedicated client can offer is much more complete, better performing and has less latency than what a web application can offer. Using a web app has security implications too, for instance there's no way gmail can securely implement GPG signatures. It could be done with a plugin, but then I need an external application already.
My preferred form of browsing is nested mode, reading pretty much the whole page from top to bottom. With the dynamic interface I simply ended up clicking "more" and lowering the threshold, until getting the equivalent result, except in 20 clicks instead of one.
From my POV, nested mode with threshold set to 1, loading the maximum amount of comments possible per page is precisely what I want, and the dynamic mode adds a lot of inconvenience. Dynamic mode also instantly breaks when I load slashdot pages for reading on the underground, where I don't have an internet connection.
My ideal version of slashdot would come with a NNTP gateway, so that I could read offline, with zero latency, use a better editor than the browser's text area, and queue replies to be sent when I get out of the train. Then the phone would just need a newsreader and I'd get a much better and lower bandwidth interface.
CSS is precisely the right technology, which allows to separate content from presentation. It's precisely the thing to allow the page to display in formats optimized for computer viewing, phone viewing, printing, disabilities, etc, without having to change the code.
Unfortunately these days it's often used to add pointless decoration.
There are different ways of acting.
Stopping dumping tons of crap into the atmosphere is unlikely to make things worse. Now trying to fix things by releasing some other chemical to try to balance the problem could backfire.
The first is like "Shouldn't we understand the complete ecosystem of the lake before we stop using it as a garbage dump?". It's generally unnecessary to wait to have a 100% complete understanding. Maybe the fish are dying for some other reason, but stopping dumping junk is unlikely to make things get any worse.
The second is more like "The lake seems too acid, maybe we should compensate by dumping several tons of base to neutralize". Now this kind of solution will require a complete understanding, lest it turns out that wasn't the problem, and things become even worse than before.
That's with a full keyboard, but plenty phones can render HTML competently and have a standard keyboard. SSH is certainly technically possible, but a pain.
It's a nice gimmick I guess, but I'd rather have it come preconfigured for easy interfacing with Cacti, then I can make my own, better graphs.
Meh, I much prefer Mutt and KMail.
Though I dislike anything on the web that requires JavaScript to work. I've got the annoying slashdot junk disabled, and I have a gmail account, but it's redirected to my IMAP server, and I never actually log into the web interface.
In theory, yeah.
In practice, I just checked my mail on my phone, saw a slashdot reply notification, and clicked the link. Then stared at the screen in disbelief, as the phone showed me that to show me a message maybe 2KB in size it had to download 1MB worth of crap.
Reloading the page is something that takes a very small fraction of a second, when the server isn't doing any heavy lifting, and the page doesn't have half a megabyte of javascript.
And a much larger amount of devices can show that simple page. The router interface shouldn't be flashy. It should be neat and simple, something you could deal with from a cell phone if it was needed in an emergency. I can't tell you how much I hate the websites of various device manufacturers that require hunting the link for the drivers download in the source, because the only available browser I had was lynx, and the link is impossible to find in it.
IMO, don't bother with the flashy stuff. I'll be the one who is going to mess with the router settings, and I want it stable, functional, and usable on all devices. If it prefers form over function I'll go with another product.
Have you by chance ever been to kuro5hin?
These days it's cesspit, but during its best days it was a site where users published long, well thought, and often technical articles about interesting subjects, some of which had effect beyond the website. For instance, Opennic (alternative root DNS servers) got started at an article on K5. Users submitted stories, and other users offered criticism during an editing period and collectively approved or rejected the story.
See for example a few links in the hall of fame to see what it used to be like.
I'd really like to find another place like that, its degeneration was very unfortunate.
My understanding of the term is that the term "solution" is supposed to apply to things that satisfy a need in a way that goes beyond the simple delivery of hardware of CDs.
For instance, if you need a quad core server with 32GB RAM, that's a product you go and buy.
If however you've determined you need a document management system, you could do that yourself, or you could go with a "solution", meaning you go to some company like say, Ricoh, and say "We need a document management system". And they give you a multifunction printer that can print and scan documents, a file server, software for the file server, software to manage scanned documents, and so on. Then they come to your company, hook all that stuff up, test it, teach you how to tell the system that faxes coming from this number should be automatically filed in this folder, and so on.
You could individually purchase and configure all the individual components, and maybe have a programer hack something up in PHP or VB, but then you have to be sure you have somebody who understands how to set that up. And perhaps even your sysadmin is unwilling to do that, because he's the one tech in a 20 person company, and if it fails to work, he'll be personally blamed for the purcase of a ton of expensive hardware.
A link to Amazon would be nice.
I'd like to see what kind of books you write.
Plantronics P590
iPods seem a great deal more common than iPhones, but I see a pretty large variety of players on the underground. And pretty much any recent phone will make an acceptable MP3 player. My phone for instance accepts 8GB cards, which would make it quite acceptable. I still prefer my dedicated player though.
Why not?
Back when the term "multimedia" started to be heavily used in relation to computers, the meaning was roughly "The same stuff as usual, except with mostly pointless sound and video attached". This seems to have mostly started with the common availability of sound cards and CD drives.
So for instance a "multimedia encyclopedia" would come on a CD, and the revolutionary feature would be that you could listen to a MIDI of Beethoven's 5th from the article.
In the same way, a MMS is a text message with a photo or video attached. An email about how you spent your vacation doesn't stop containing text because you attach a few photos, right?
Wikipedia says: "The Micro-USB connector was announced by the USB-IF on January 4, 2007 and the Mini-USB connectors were withdrawn". So Micro-B then.
Though standarization on USB would be a great start. A mini to micro adapter can be made easily, and wouldn't require another cable that'd add to the tangled cabling mess in the backpack.
In America maybe, but not in Europe. In Spain the only person I know who had an iPhone was a coworker, who complained it was a fancy looking piece of junk. My mother recently asked me what an iPhone *was* and she works in tourism. And I've seen them offered for 0 Euros, though I'm sure a high priced contract of some sort is attached. Considering her current contract is 10 Euros a month, and I vaguely remembered iPhones coming with $60/month contracts, she instantly lost interest.
Two words: Japanese toilet
Where have you seen an iPod dock connector on a device that doesn't plug into an Apple product?
For instance, my mini-B cable both fits my Cowon D2 music player, and my Canon photo camera. My Nokia phone unfortunately does have its own weird charging connector, but standarization should take care of that in a few years. And since it has full Bluetooth support, it's not really a problem as for anything other than charging I don't need a cable anyway.
SMS allows sending a few bytes of text. MMS allows sending images, sound, video and rich text.
Generally not very useful IMO, but can ocassionally come handy. For instance with my phone I could open the GPS app, make it calculate a route, save an image of the GPS display, and send that by MMS to somebody who is trying to find a place, but has no GPS on their phone.
I don't get what's not to like about a BT headset.
I've got a stereo one. It looks like a pair of headphones, except with no cable, and a little microphone that can be pulled out. It's got good sound quality, there's no way to get the wire get tangled with anything, I can simply remove it from my head and put it somewhere without again messing with the cable, and if I get a call I can hit a button and switch from the music to the cell phone.
That last part seemed unnecessary (I bought it for music), but it came really handy when I had to mess with the wiring in the rack. Phone rings, just one button press, and I can put the phone in my pocket and have both hands free to mess with the cabling, while continuing talking to the other tech. What's not to like?
I've only seen an iPod dock connector once so far, on an iPod owned by a coworker who complained he hated the thing *shrug*
I have no clue by what you mean "check backpacks" either. My backpack has a USB mini-B cable in it and a short length of Cat5e.
No, the question we should ask us is precisely "why is Japan so far ahead of us technologically". I want to know why they can have all that fancy stuff on their phones, and I can't. The question "why is Japan so far behind us in soft technologies?" is not for us, but for Japan. It's their problem, so it's them who should think about it. Why waste time on thinking why somebody else has a problem you don't?
Then for example the Ishar and Eye of Beholder games are FPSes too?
True, they are from a "first person" perspective, but the gameplay is nothing alike.
In Ishar and EOB for instance, the concept of having to shoot at a target with precision is completely inexistent. You have a sword equipped, you click the sword icon, the character swings the sword, and the hit or miss is determined by a virtual dice roll. Being successful at Ishar 3 is a completely different skill as being successful at Quake 3, and mostly a matter of long term thinking, correct selection of equipment, using the right spells, doing the right thing at the right time, etc. The insane reflexes needed in Quake 3 to run and shoot precisely the instant an enemy appears are of absolutely no help.
Shooting gallery games also are nothing alike a FPS. They invoke different emotions even. In a shooting gallery you normally can't retreat, can't run away and hide behind a corner, can't run after a wounded enemy, can't have a battle between snipers, or to snipe targets from large distances, etc. Shooting galleries are very linear, and things like several people running around like crazy and shooting missiles at each other are inexistent.
Pin not needed. I thought this sounded awfully thick. Wikipedia says:
Most of them of course lack a deep understanding, but that's not really what I'm talking about.
The various grandmas and aunts people like to refer to, who are hopelessly confused if you move around the icons on their desktop or change the colors *are* shrinking. Those people who base their usage of a computer on memorization of steps (click here, click there) and become lost when something unexpected happens are disappearing.
Today's teenagers are perfectly proficent at using various programs without having to follow a fixed list of steps, and can figure out how to use a new program by themselves. They might not be geniuses, but they should have enough intelligence to figure out the generic concept of "word processor" and how to adapt to one with a slightly different interface.
It's just like people who thought moving vehicles must have been created with the help of Satan, because they couldn't conceivably understand how such a thing was possible, eventually died out to be replaced with people who don't think there's anything strange about a modern car. Most people don't understand the mechanics in deep detail, but aren't afraid of it, and don't think it runs on black magic, unlike their ancestors.
Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if it got into the DSM in a few years.
After all what's considered a psychological problem and not varied a lot over time. Not so long ago, being left handed was a problem to be fixed, and women had hysteria. I'm pretty sure those things appeared in some medical manual back then, and now they probably don't. Freud had also a lot of weird theories that before his time didn't exist, then started existing, then went on to be considered as bullshit.
So really, all it takes is enough doctors to agree on that homophobia is a psychological problem, and it'll start appearing in medical texts.
The very idea that it's possible to have a conversation with somebody on the other side of the globe also blows some people's minds, I bet.
But those people are old and (no offense intended) will eventually die. Today most teenagers would probably fail to understand your attempts to explain how mindblowing a cell phone is compared to what things were like 50 years ago, as it's a completely normal thing that always was there for them.
The number of people who think a computer is a magical and impossible to understand device is steadily shrinking, as they're replaced by people who grew up with computers and don't see anything particularly strange about them. And those people who really don't know how to use a computer aren't using Windows because it's magic in any way, it's simply because that's what other people use. If more knowledgeable people switch, so will they.
The kernel is too big.
It might work with smaller projects. But the kernel has had thousands of contributors, some of which won't sell for any price, some that can't be found anymore and some that are now dead. Just figuring out who holds the copyright over which parts of files patched by 50 different people over its existence would be a nightmare.
Then there are tricky questions. Such as, who owns the copyright for a line where the first contributor did the general concept, the second patched the off by one error, and the third added a check for the return value? How much must a block of code change to determine that the original author's code is now gone if it retains the functionality?
Precisely what I'm saying. The grandparent is a "security analyst" complaining about the .bash_history file being incomplete. I'm asking, even if it was complete, it's ultimately under the user's control, so how could you trust its contents, given so many ways to mess with it?
For security, how can you trust user controlled files?
It's easy to mess with the history file. I could "ln -sf /dev/null .bashrc". I could start any text editor, like vi, open the file from inside it, and remove incriminating lines. I could strategically use the history bug and make sure that the lines I want are overwritten.
A more interesting option is uploading a program that contains a function that messes with the history file, or even its own shell.
The only way you can trust logged commands if the logging was performed outside the user's control, and the user had no way to evade it.