the storm went RC1, and just off the coast of Florida they made it GM just in time for the project to be scrapped and the entire structure swallowed up by Wilma 1.0.
I'll just hazard a guess... the recording industry doesn't want MS anywhere near their turf. Not as a client, not as a distributor, not as anything. They would make the barrier to entry to freaking steep that *if* MS took the bait the company would be so financially burdened it could not monpolize them and the PC desktop both.
Their leadership probably does realize it. Moving in that direction is probably not an option.
China is less like a large country and more like a small planet. What they would have to do in order to "move forward" is to come up with the strategic equivalent of a world government in order to unify and manage their enormous territory, cultural diversity and population.
Say what you want to about the EU and the United Nations (or even the United States of America for that matter) humans have not been able to come up with a way to govern an entire planet, large or small. Probably not within reach given our ancestry. Semi-autonomous computers could change that perhaps (re-read your Appleseed) but would we allow it?
Central planning was the Chinese best shot. It failed. Going forward might not even be an option for them now. We'll see.
it is this: I have a technology that has a 99.9999999% hit rate but requires someone to sit at the console of the spam filter and manually release false positives, manually train the filter to false negatives, manually whitelist incoming emails based on what people are sending outbound, manually authenticate inbound emails by calling the sending party on the phone, and manually update the RBL.
Reading over the list of offenses, looks like MS ran afoul of the same virulent nationist quasi religious extremism anybody else might have. OK, the "bitch" thing is a different kind of problem.
OT -- So far, I have not read many serious posts in this thread. I imagine people are afraid of sparking religio-political flame wars by speaking plainly. That in itself is interesting, don't you think?
Here in San Jose, the busy center of Silicon Valley, the city CTO snuggled with Cisco on telecom equipment to the tune of $8M for the new city hall still under construction. Cisco horned in early, wrote the IT specs, wrote the equipment list using Cisco products, recommended an installer, and got the CTO to write a letter saying that Cisco didn't influence the process. Word got out, the CTO is canned, her staff is canned, even the janitor may come under investigation, criminal investigations are started, Cisco cries that they have been framed, and the City has to rebid the whole thing setting back construction for months.
All around, probably a half dozen high level IT positions will need to be filled as well before the dust settles, introducing more delays. The fiasco will cost so much money and time that the Mayor may lose the next election.
So yeah, not everyone walks away laughing. The goddess Eris must be having a good time, though.
you know, throw/kick the ball as far as you can toward the goal and pray someone on your side makes a great play with it.
"Calculated risk" is indeed a business model. Almost every business that isn't funded by a trust is based on risk of losses. It's not like they are shuttering the profitable business, they are cashing it out and throwing everything into what is obviously a make-or-break play. Maybe CD burners are boring. Maybe there are no great business opportunites left worth fighting over. Maybe someone is rich enough to want to play with some money.
It isn't insane, it's just risky. I happen to think it is insanely risky, but that's just me. Still if I were sitting on a cool $80M with everything to lose and not much to gain I would give myself a nice salary, make a great try at stardom, and if it went down badly I'd buy an island in the South Pacific and retire to study beaches and waves.
I have removed many copies of Windows from PCs (other than the few PCs I've built) but these were all USED PCs from others in my office who get upgrades. THEY get a nice upgrade laptop/desktop once a year and I grab their old one, wipe it, maybe drop in some RAM, and install a Linux disty.
This is actually most excellent, because it takes a year or two for some hardware to get Linux drivers (esp in laptops). So by the time the "old" machine hits the IT room as surplus usually there is everything I need to get it running Linux already on a Linux distro CD.
We all know that Linux is a great way to get more miles out of used computers (especially lightly used ones) and all I need do is overwrite Windows. Which I do. We don't have ANY surplus machines as a result (well except for some lame Celeron crap I don't give a fig about).
Well really, isn't that what happens in the end? In the end, the only thing that is safe to own is an object made entirely of atoms, or to take your entertainment directly converted to analog forms like light and sound, as (so far) we cannot duplicate atoms, pressure waves or electromagnetic radiation exactly or easily. Whereas we can easily and almost infinitely duplicate the pattern of electrons in a circuit (computer RAM or internet packets) or the patterns of magnetic domains strewn across a surface (hard drives, mylar tape, floppy disk surfaces, etc.) that make up the *bits* in digital things, and that fact is totally freaking out someone who knows how to make huge sums of money off the movement of atoms and electromagnetic frequencies but not the movement of digital bits.
You get the feeling that there are people out there who are at war with the notion of regular people having access to bits. They want to restrict what bits you can see translated in analog forms of light and sound. They like having the bits to themselves as they are easy to store, transmit and convert, but they do NOT want anyone other than media companies to have access to the conversion process. We get the analog forms they want us to have, when they want us to have them (after the exchange of atoms in the form of currency) and not a moment before.
"trustworthy computing" is headed the same way. They will let you pretend to own the computer (money changes hands first) and you can use your eyes free of charge to enjoy whatever shows up on your monitor, but every bit that goes thru the thing must be approved by a central authority, and you may have to buy (money changes hands again) the right to see the analog conversion take place on the hardware you "own". Oh, and they'll sell you vinyl LPs because you cannot buy the equipment to duplicate them yourself.
Vinyl! God help us. I can't believe we've come back to vinyl as a safe and permitted portable music format. I suppose Apple will come up with a version of the iPod to play tiny vinyl LPs. Four songs in your pocket.
I can't stand it. I just cannot stand this crap any more.
Indeed. I've noticed a direct correlation between not understanding the Internet, and fearing it.
Case in point: I knew an administrative assistant once who kept a towel draped over the front of her monitor when she wasn't using the computer so people connected elsewhere on the LAN couldn't watch her paint her nails on the job. This was around 1990 at a university, and they were just then pushing out the administrative network to departments. She didn't want LAN access when it first arrived. Kept pulling the coax out of the back of her PC, and then the bit with the towel. She was really that scared. Really opened my eyes, I'll tell you.
This sort of thing (though more subtle) is more common than most of us realize.
Kind of along the same lines, Apple's Unix-like OS was set to be numbered as the 10th Macintosh operating system, but they chose to go with "X" instead. Apple pronounces it "OS-ten" but most folks still call it "OS ex" which comes out sounding "oh sex" which if you think about it was brillian marketing.
I suppose we'll have "oh sex" for years, numbered "pro, II, III" etc just like the Pentium did. When you have a winner, you run it in every race.
Couples already spend an average of $80K in the US to marry, of which saying your vows takes a few minutes. Add in the time for the reception etc, maybe an afternoon. That's *average* cost for an afternoon's diversion so clearly someone is spending rather more than that. Oh, and that doesn't count the cost of the honeymoon. Think, the cost of 2 weeks touring, or a cruise.
So now think about $100K to have the whole thing in orbit. The Earth and all its people, a glowing gem below your feet. The infinit expanse of the heavens and stars above, the Milky Way a dazzling splash of stars lighting your wedding bed. Together and in love before the face of the eternal universe, hanging literally between Heaven and Earth.
It would be the easiest sell in the history of sales. Once it goes up on Expedia it would book solid in 3 seconds and stay booked solid 10 years out, forever.
Of course, there wouldn't be 800 invited guests up there with you to toss rice at you. So one can assume the event is televised and the rice tossing would happen when you climbed down out of the return ship.;)
Mr. Church is right, people will be able to "code" whatever they want. But if that's so, then it's because the fabs automate a lot of the base sequencing and assembly. And if that's the case, then simply have the machines *always* write in some RNA/DNA sequences as unintended introns that enforce a simple TTL concept. Not sure what that would be, could be any of:
-- some sequences are more abundant than the rest, and these code for self-destruct proteins (perhaps enzymes) that slowly accumulate; -- some sequences code for something inert, similar to plastic, that gradually accumulate and eventually mechnically destroy the biomachine; -- the genetic code has regions that are chemically reactive to something else that is being created (perhaps an inhibitor protein) and eventually the genetic code is tained and slowly denatured; -- Have a small sequence where a protein is created which, when abundant enough, stimulates creation of itself. A positive feedback race condition is set up after a certain period of time and the pathogen ties up resources in making the one protein.
I see a technical problem, that's all. Someone will figure it out.
Actually, probably originally "ring around all rosie" which is a reference to the first signs of an infection; red rings around the flea bites.
"Pocket full of posies..."
Posies being thought a ward against the Devil. And who could blame them? It looked like the end of all Creation.
"Ashes...ashes..."
At least, most kids say "ashes" because those fall down. But actually it is supposed to be "achoos", the sound of sneezing. Along with the rings, severe sneezing was an early symptom of plague. And we still say "bless you" to someone who sneezes, not realizing that we are saying "oh bless you but you have the plague! you are dead. may god have mercy on your soul!" Cheerful thought.
"We all fall down!"...which they certainly did. Bodies piled up in the streets some places, and people were buried just where they fell.
Just to show what a small world it is... I did some db development for the animal doctor/surgeon who perfected the technique on dogs in his vet practice, using technology developed by a guy who died just before it went gold.
I guess hip problems are common in some canine species, so the technique go a lot of trial while doing some for animals. And dogs come in many sizes so the techniques once refined could scale easily according to mathematical models.
This was about 10 years ago. If it's not the same outfit, then there was some parallel work going on. In any event, deploying robots to do hip replacements was a no-brainer; hips are done all the time and are very mechanical, yet are easy to screw up and often require re-tooling at a later date. The guy I worked for was very excited that "permanent" hip replacements were in the offing. Certainly the dogs seemed to do very well, running and jumping and the whole thing. Miracles, really, according to him.
But dogs can't report the same kinds of subtle post-op issues a human could and would. Maybe it was a technology still not ready for prime time?
I wrote the Linux code in Amsterdam in 1989
on
Who Wrote Linux?
·
· Score: 1
I was hanging in a pub in Amsterdam, having consumed far too much coffee with this Finnish guy I had met that morning, who's name I never did get, when suddenly I was gripped by this totally wild irrational urge to code a Unix-like OS! The whole thing just poured out of me in one horrible spasm of caffeine induced delirium! Thousands of lines of code on the back of napkins, envelopes, scratch paper. It was a total mess but my buddy kept gathering up the lose leafs and stuffing them into his coat, and getting me more coffee.
And it was brilliant, a perfect micro-kernel archtecture with utilities and a user shell. The Fin kept yelling at me "it should be monolithic! Make it monolithic!" but I had no idea at that time what was the big deal. Maybe I made it monolithic, I don't remember.
Then after about 48 hours of this I passed out. When I wake up, the Fin is gone, as are my pages of code. I didn't give it a second thought; everyone in Amsterdam in 1989 was doing way too much coffee, getting strung out and then writing operating systems. I wired my parents for money and went home and forgot the whole thing.
Two years later, and some guy on Usenet reveals that he has a unix-like thing if people want to play with it. So I download it and what the hell, it's my code. Coffee stains and everything.
So yeah I wrote Linux. But I'm OK with how it turned out. Some people are great at writing operating systems, some people are great at getting them to market. But I sometimes wish Torvalds would just confess and tell everyone that he really got the code off a drinking buddy at a pub in Amsterdam. Because that's what happened. But it's his karma that's burning, you know what I mean?
The comment has been made in several posts that "this is what you get when non-technical people try to deal with technical issues."
Actually there are far more non-techies than techies. So naturally it will happen that yes *they* do get involved. In fact, since the Internet went commercial Way Back When this day has been coming.
Face it, so long as networking was a tech toy, nobody cared how we managed it or optimized it. So long as email got where it needed to go the PHB was happy even if he did wonder what we did for our wages.
Then people starting running businesses on the Internnet. And anywhere there there is money flowing there is also random larceny savored with relentless stupidity. Remember the whole sex.com thing? How long did that take to resolve? And what about domain squatting? That was interesting. And all that woo-haa about similar sounding domains infringing copyrights and trademarks? And Google bombing? And phishing? And domain typo-hijacking? And spamspamspamspam? And the RIAA? And SCO?
I don't know about money being the root of all evil, but I'll submit it is the root of all malcontentment. Don't *ever* get in the way of a fool and his money.
His 90 years were spent in the final decades of the Industrial Revolution, started (depending on who you cite) some 200 years before he was born. He did help usher in the next Big Deal; information technology and globalization.
That one is still being worked out. I don't think we have fully entered into the Golden Age of Global IT just yet; we're still hacking, the equivalent of James Watt tinkering with steam engine designs in 1769.
Once Watt figured out the optimal steam engine design, the next revolution was ready to roll. Including two global conflicts and sooty skys and everything else, but you take the bad with the good. And it's been mostly good.
So what will be the equivalent of the steam engine for IT? The personal computer? The web server and HTTP protocol? Or F/OSS and Linux? Has the revolutiion begun on the basis of what we have, or are we just setting the groundwork for the real innovations yet to come?
I suspect the latter, but even with the delay I fully expect to see this revolution work itself out in rather less than 90 years. I am 45, I nevertheless expect to personally see the fruit of this labor born out; everything happens faster on the 'net.
Hey, my first linux distro back in around '98 was Slack, downloaded and copied to a whole box of floppy diskettes over a 28.8 modem! The installer was the same one as recent distros (haven't seen 10 yet) and was a pain to run, and of course you had to feed it all those diskettes, but I got it working on an old AMD boxen I'd built from spare parts.
I ran across the diskettes recently while cleaning up the garage, but the irony is that none of my current systems seem to have floppy drives any more.
Sadly, I think I tossed the diskettes out.
And in the end, have our systems really improved that much over the years? You would think so. But I look back and I'm not so sure. Even back then, there was so much to work with.
So AOL lost control of their list. Bah. They never had control. It was only a matter of time, and now that spam is becoming big business now was the time. The only way to manage these things correctly regarding the IT team would have been:
1) Restrict mobile/personal storage and technology within the IT core; 2) search employees entering and leaving the IT facilities for CDs, storage dongles, smart cards, USB-enabled watches and lapel pins, MP3 players, laptop computers, palmtop devices, etc; 3) workstations used by developers have no Internet access whatever; 4) no public/personal email access from developer workstations; 5) the firewalls and other IT are managed by people who never come into contact with someone who themselves has access to data, and IT people have no access to data themselves; 6) all data traversing the LAN is AES encrypted; 7) there is no wireless access anywhere in the business, period.
Did AOL do *any* of this? Even one thing? I doubt it. Why would they? these aren't even standard practices except maybe at the NSA.
And that's just the AOL IT people. What do you then do with the marketing and sales folk? Presumably, they don't have the right kind of access to bulk data in the first place and/or cannot save data to storage that they can pull up in the normal course of work, but that's another policy to set up and more restrictions (ie, they cannot save files to their workstation, and cannot burn CDs, and cannot bring laptop computers home, etc.) And what if AOL decided to outsource customer support? What path does data take then?
All of this would kinda-sorta make sense when protecting things like source code where there are only a few that need access anyway, and there is no obvious reason for the code to leave the site. But in the case of customer account info, that's not restricted to development and the customers are dealing with very low level employees who need a broad kind of access to customer data to deal with customer issues.
I don't know if there are very many companies that would put their minimum wage earning sales and support drones (or their outsource suppliers) through that kind of security policy. And the marketing people would simply bite your head off at the very mention of leaving their laptop computers at work.
Reality: The only personal data that is safe is the data that is encrypted, then the passcode encrypted, then the passcode is lost, then the data is deleted, then the disk containing the data is formatted and overwritten with random bits, then the disk removed from the system and shredded, and then the small bits are randomly distributed over the surface of the sea. At night during a storm.
Failing all that...well don't expect your personal data to be private for any length of time so long as someone...anyone...the janitor...an intern...a poor working mother in Pakistan...can make a buck (exactly $1US) selling it.
Hmm...tempting. But I think we should all of us get over the idea that individual users should be fined or abused somehow because of flaws in the system. For I think we all here can agree that the Internet, inherently trustful as it is, is flawed. It was a great 70's idea of every host trusting every other that just wasn't ready for prime time.
I recall the gnashing of teeth when the Internet went public back-in-the-day. Pundits were forcasting all sorts of doom and gloom involving what happens when a free service falls into the hands of corporations. And maybe there have been abuses from corporations (spammers are a business too). But I don't think anyone predicted what really came to happen; trust became a liability. And as a result public email would die from the weight of its own success.
Future systems will need to have learned from this episode; trust no one.
The airlines gave that much no doubt because they were asked to. And the reason why they were asked to is because it takes a lot of data points on an individual to fully cross-link and cross-reference all the scattered databases that are used to define who someone is and what they are doing recently.
Yeah it is excessive. I don't like it at all. It is spooky. But it happens all the time though generally on a smaller scale.
This is just one time when it was on a huge scale, and so we found out.
Before very long there will be a lot of strangers in the world (I mean all over the world, including offshore outsourced data mining facilities) that know more about the Total You than anyone you actually know personally, outside yourself. That's one of the reasons why privacy laws are such a total flipping joke in the absence of data secrecy.
It's probably better just to stay out of the databases if you don't want your whole life being dredged up in the next terrorist-inspired data dragnet.
Slashdot Mirror
the storm went RC1, and just off the coast of Florida they made it GM just in time for the project to be scrapped and the entire structure swallowed up by Wilma 1.0.
Thank you thank you I'll be here all week.
I'll just hazard a guess... the recording industry doesn't want MS anywhere near their turf. Not as a client, not as a distributor, not as anything. They would make the barrier to entry to freaking steep that *if* MS took the bait the company would be so financially burdened it could not monpolize them and the PC desktop both.
...feudalism. Get your serf on.
Their leadership probably does realize it. Moving in that direction is probably not an option.
China is less like a large country and more like a small planet. What they would have to do in order to "move forward" is to come up with the strategic equivalent of a world government in order to unify and manage their enormous territory, cultural diversity and population.
Say what you want to about the EU and the United Nations (or even the United States of America for that matter) humans have not been able to come up with a way to govern an entire planet, large or small. Probably not within reach given our ancestry. Semi-autonomous computers could change that perhaps (re-read your Appleseed) but would we allow it?
Central planning was the Chinese best shot. It failed. Going forward might not even be an option for them now. We'll see.
it is this: I have a technology that has a 99.9999999% hit rate but requires someone to sit at the console of the spam filter and manually release false positives, manually train the filter to false negatives, manually whitelist incoming emails based on what people are sending outbound, manually authenticate inbound emails by calling the sending party on the phone, and manually update the RBL.
We're losing the battle, you know.
Reading over the list of offenses, looks like MS ran afoul of the same virulent nationist quasi religious extremism anybody else might have. OK, the "bitch" thing is a different kind of problem.
OT -- So far, I have not read many serious posts in this thread. I imagine people are afraid of sparking religio-political flame wars by speaking plainly. That in itself is interesting, don't you think?
Here in San Jose, the busy center of Silicon Valley, the city CTO snuggled with Cisco on telecom equipment to the tune of $8M for the new city hall still under construction. Cisco horned in early, wrote the IT specs, wrote the equipment list using Cisco products, recommended an installer, and got the CTO to write a letter saying that Cisco didn't influence the process. Word got out, the CTO is canned, her staff is canned, even the janitor may come under investigation, criminal investigations are started, Cisco cries that they have been framed, and the City has to rebid the whole thing setting back construction for months.
All around, probably a half dozen high level IT positions will need to be filled as well before the dust settles, introducing more delays. The fiasco will cost so much money and time that the Mayor may lose the next election.
So yeah, not everyone walks away laughing. The goddess Eris must be having a good time, though.
you know, throw/kick the ball as far as you can toward the goal and pray someone on your side makes a great play with it.
"Calculated risk" is indeed a business model. Almost every business that isn't funded by a trust is based on risk of losses. It's not like they are shuttering the profitable business, they are cashing it out and throwing everything into what is obviously a make-or-break play. Maybe CD burners are boring. Maybe there are no great business opportunites left worth fighting over. Maybe someone is rich enough to want to play with some money.
It isn't insane, it's just risky. I happen to think it is insanely risky, but that's just me. Still if I were sitting on a cool $80M with everything to lose and not much to gain I would give myself a nice salary, make a great try at stardom, and if it went down badly I'd buy an island in the South Pacific and retire to study beaches and waves.
And how insane is that, really?
I have removed many copies of Windows from PCs (other than the few PCs I've built) but these were all USED PCs from others in my office who get upgrades. THEY get a nice upgrade laptop/desktop once a year and I grab their old one, wipe it, maybe drop in some RAM, and install a Linux disty.
This is actually most excellent, because it takes a year or two for some hardware to get Linux drivers (esp in laptops). So by the time the "old" machine hits the IT room as surplus usually there is everything I need to get it running Linux already on a Linux distro CD.
We all know that Linux is a great way to get more miles out of used computers (especially lightly used ones) and all I need do is overwrite Windows. Which I do. We don't have ANY surplus machines as a result (well except for some lame Celeron crap I don't give a fig about).
Well really, isn't that what happens in the end? In the end, the only thing that is safe to own is an object made entirely of atoms, or to take your entertainment directly converted to analog forms like light and sound, as (so far) we cannot duplicate atoms, pressure waves or electromagnetic radiation exactly or easily. Whereas we can easily and almost infinitely duplicate the pattern of electrons in a circuit (computer RAM or internet packets) or the patterns of magnetic domains strewn across a surface (hard drives, mylar tape, floppy disk surfaces, etc.) that make up the *bits* in digital things, and that fact is totally freaking out someone who knows how to make huge sums of money off the movement of atoms and electromagnetic frequencies but not the movement of digital bits.
You get the feeling that there are people out there who are at war with the notion of regular people having access to bits. They want to restrict what bits you can see translated in analog forms of light and sound. They like having the bits to themselves as they are easy to store, transmit and convert, but they do NOT want anyone other than media companies to have access to the conversion process. We get the analog forms they want us to have, when they want us to have them (after the exchange of atoms in the form of currency) and not a moment before.
"trustworthy computing" is headed the same way. They will let you pretend to own the computer (money changes hands first) and you can use your eyes free of charge to enjoy whatever shows up on your monitor, but every bit that goes thru the thing must be approved by a central authority, and you may have to buy (money changes hands again) the right to see the analog conversion take place on the hardware you "own". Oh, and they'll sell you vinyl LPs because you cannot buy the equipment to duplicate them yourself.
Vinyl! God help us. I can't believe we've come back to vinyl as a safe and permitted portable music format. I suppose Apple will come up with a version of the iPod to play tiny vinyl LPs. Four songs in your pocket.
I can't stand it. I just cannot stand this crap any more.
Indeed. I've noticed a direct correlation between not understanding the Internet, and fearing it.
Case in point: I knew an administrative assistant once who kept a towel draped over the front of her monitor when she wasn't using the computer so people connected elsewhere on the LAN couldn't watch her paint her nails on the job. This was around 1990 at a university, and they were just then pushing out the administrative network to departments. She didn't want LAN access when it first arrived. Kept pulling the coax out of the back of her PC, and then the bit with the towel. She was really that scared. Really opened my eyes, I'll tell you.
This sort of thing (though more subtle) is more common than most of us realize.
Kind of along the same lines, Apple's Unix-like OS was set to be numbered as the 10th Macintosh operating system, but they chose to go with "X" instead. Apple pronounces it "OS-ten" but most folks still call it "OS ex" which comes out sounding "oh sex" which if you think about it was brillian marketing.
I suppose we'll have "oh sex" for years, numbered "pro, II, III" etc just like the Pentium did. When you have a winner, you run it in every race.
Couples already spend an average of $80K in the US to marry, of which saying your vows takes a few minutes. Add in the time for the reception etc, maybe an afternoon. That's *average* cost for an afternoon's diversion so clearly someone is spending rather more than that. Oh, and that doesn't count the cost of the honeymoon. Think, the cost of 2 weeks touring, or a cruise.
;)
So now think about $100K to have the whole thing in orbit. The Earth and all its people, a glowing gem below your feet. The infinit expanse of the heavens and stars above, the Milky Way a dazzling splash of stars lighting your wedding bed. Together and in love before the face of the eternal universe, hanging literally between Heaven and Earth.
It would be the easiest sell in the history of sales. Once it goes up on Expedia it would book solid in 3 seconds and stay booked solid 10 years out, forever.
Of course, there wouldn't be 800 invited guests up there with you to toss rice at you. So one can assume the event is televised and the rice tossing would happen when you climbed down out of the return ship.
Mr. Church is right, people will be able to "code" whatever they want. But if that's so, then it's because the fabs automate a lot of the base sequencing and assembly. And if that's the case, then simply have the machines *always* write in some RNA/DNA sequences as unintended introns that enforce a simple TTL concept. Not sure what that would be, could be any of:
-- some sequences are more abundant than the rest, and these code for self-destruct proteins (perhaps enzymes) that slowly accumulate;
-- some sequences code for something inert, similar to plastic, that gradually accumulate and eventually mechnically destroy the biomachine;
-- the genetic code has regions that are chemically reactive to something else that is being created (perhaps an inhibitor protein) and eventually the genetic code is tained and slowly denatured;
-- Have a small sequence where a protein is created which, when abundant enough, stimulates creation of itself. A positive feedback race condition is set up after a certain period of time and the pathogen ties up resources in making the one protein.
I see a technical problem, that's all. Someone will figure it out.
Very true:
...which they certainly did. Bodies piled up in the streets some places, and people were buried just where they fell.
"Ring around the rosie..."
Actually, probably originally "ring around all rosie" which is a reference to the first signs of an infection; red rings around the flea bites.
"Pocket full of posies..."
Posies being thought a ward against the Devil. And who could blame them? It looked like the end of all Creation.
"Ashes...ashes..."
At least, most kids say "ashes" because those fall down. But actually it is supposed to be "achoos", the sound of sneezing. Along with the rings, severe sneezing was an early symptom of plague. And we still say "bless you" to someone who sneezes, not realizing that we are saying "oh bless you but you have the plague! you are dead. may god have mercy on your soul!" Cheerful thought.
"We all fall down!"
Just to show what a small world it is... I did some db development for the animal doctor/surgeon who perfected the technique on dogs in his vet practice, using technology developed by a guy who died just before it went gold.
I guess hip problems are common in some canine species, so the technique go a lot of trial while doing some for animals. And dogs come in many sizes so the techniques once refined could scale easily according to mathematical models.
This was about 10 years ago. If it's not the same outfit, then there was some parallel work going on. In any event, deploying robots to do hip replacements was a no-brainer; hips are done all the time and are very mechanical, yet are easy to screw up and often require re-tooling at a later date. The guy I worked for was very excited that "permanent" hip replacements were in the offing. Certainly the dogs seemed to do very well, running and jumping and the whole thing. Miracles, really, according to him.
But dogs can't report the same kinds of subtle post-op issues a human could and would. Maybe it was a technology still not ready for prime time?
I was hanging in a pub in Amsterdam, having consumed far too much coffee with this Finnish guy I had met that morning, who's name I never did get, when suddenly I was gripped by this totally wild irrational urge to code a Unix-like OS! The whole thing just poured out of me in one horrible spasm of caffeine induced delirium! Thousands of lines of code on the back of napkins, envelopes, scratch paper. It was a total mess but my buddy kept gathering up the lose leafs and stuffing them into his coat, and getting me more coffee.
And it was brilliant, a perfect micro-kernel archtecture with utilities and a user shell. The Fin kept yelling at me "it should be monolithic! Make it monolithic!" but I had no idea at that time what was the big deal. Maybe I made it monolithic, I don't remember.
Then after about 48 hours of this I passed out. When I wake up, the Fin is gone, as are my pages of code. I didn't give it a second thought; everyone in Amsterdam in 1989 was doing way too much coffee, getting strung out and then writing operating systems. I wired my parents for money and went home and forgot the whole thing.
Two years later, and some guy on Usenet reveals that he has a unix-like thing if people want to play with it. So I download it and what the hell, it's my code. Coffee stains and everything.
So yeah I wrote Linux. But I'm OK with how it turned out. Some people are great at writing operating systems, some people are great at getting them to market. But I sometimes wish Torvalds would just confess and tell everyone that he really got the code off a drinking buddy at a pub in Amsterdam. Because that's what happened. But it's his karma that's burning, you know what I mean?
...and so I guess if Dell was trying to fly under the radar vis-a-vis their partners in Redmond, I guess we blew it for them, eh?
Me, crying an ocean of tears...not.
nesting is the key! I am nested deeper! I have the prize!
The comment has been made in several posts that "this is what you get when non-technical people try to deal with technical issues."
Actually there are far more non-techies than techies. So naturally it will happen that yes *they* do get involved. In fact, since the Internet went commercial Way Back When this day has been coming.
Face it, so long as networking was a tech toy, nobody cared how we managed it or optimized it. So long as email got where it needed to go the PHB was happy even if he did wonder what we did for our wages.
Then people starting running businesses on the Internnet. And anywhere there there is money flowing there is also random larceny savored with relentless stupidity. Remember the whole sex.com thing? How long did that take to resolve? And what about domain squatting? That was interesting. And all that woo-haa about similar sounding domains infringing copyrights and trademarks? And Google bombing? And phishing? And domain typo-hijacking? And spamspamspamspam? And the RIAA? And SCO?
I don't know about money being the root of all evil, but I'll submit it is the root of all malcontentment. Don't *ever* get in the way of a fool and his money.
His 90 years were spent in the final decades of the Industrial Revolution, started (depending on who you cite) some 200 years before he was born. He did help usher in the next Big Deal; information technology and globalization.
That one is still being worked out. I don't think we have fully entered into the Golden Age of Global IT just yet; we're still hacking, the equivalent of James Watt tinkering with steam engine designs in 1769.
Once Watt figured out the optimal steam engine design, the next revolution was ready to roll. Including two global conflicts and sooty skys and everything else, but you take the bad with the good. And it's been mostly good.
So what will be the equivalent of the steam engine for IT? The personal computer? The web server and HTTP protocol? Or F/OSS and Linux? Has the revolutiion begun on the basis of what we have, or are we just setting the groundwork for the real innovations yet to come?
I suspect the latter, but even with the delay I fully expect to see this revolution work itself out in rather less than 90 years. I am 45, I nevertheless expect to personally see the fruit of this labor born out; everything happens faster on the 'net.
Hey, my first linux distro back in around '98 was Slack, downloaded and copied to a whole box of floppy diskettes over a 28.8 modem! The installer was the same one as recent distros (haven't seen 10 yet) and was a pain to run, and of course you had to feed it all those diskettes, but I got it working on an old AMD boxen I'd built from spare parts.
I ran across the diskettes recently while cleaning up the garage, but the irony is that none of my current systems seem to have floppy drives any more.
Sadly, I think I tossed the diskettes out.
And in the end, have our systems really improved that much over the years? You would think so. But I look back and I'm not so sure. Even back then, there was so much to work with.
So AOL lost control of their list. Bah. They never had control. It was only a matter of time, and now that spam is becoming big business now was the time. The only way to manage these things correctly regarding the IT team would have been:
1) Restrict mobile/personal storage and technology within the IT core;
2) search employees entering and leaving the IT facilities for CDs, storage dongles, smart cards, USB-enabled watches and lapel pins, MP3 players, laptop computers, palmtop devices, etc;
3) workstations used by developers have no Internet access whatever;
4) no public/personal email access from developer workstations;
5) the firewalls and other IT are managed by people who never come into contact with someone who themselves has access to data, and IT people have no access to data themselves;
6) all data traversing the LAN is AES encrypted;
7) there is no wireless access anywhere in the business, period.
Did AOL do *any* of this? Even one thing? I doubt it. Why would they? these aren't even standard practices except maybe at the NSA.
And that's just the AOL IT people. What do you then do with the marketing and sales folk? Presumably, they don't have the right kind of access to bulk data in the first place and/or cannot save data to storage that they can pull up in the normal course of work, but that's another policy to set up and more restrictions (ie, they cannot save files to their workstation, and cannot burn CDs, and cannot bring laptop computers home, etc.) And what if AOL decided to outsource customer support? What path does data take then?
All of this would kinda-sorta make sense when protecting things like source code where there are only a few that need access anyway, and there is no obvious reason for the code to leave the site. But in the case of customer account info, that's not restricted to development and the customers are dealing with very low level employees who need a broad kind of access to customer data to deal with customer issues.
I don't know if there are very many companies that would put their minimum wage earning sales and support drones (or their outsource suppliers) through that kind of security policy. And the marketing people would simply bite your head off at the very mention of leaving their laptop computers at work.
Reality: The only personal data that is safe is the data that is encrypted, then the passcode encrypted, then the passcode is lost, then the data is deleted, then the disk containing the data is formatted and overwritten with random bits, then the disk removed from the system and shredded, and then the small bits are randomly distributed over the surface of the sea. At night during a storm.
Failing all that...well don't expect your personal data to be private for any length of time so long as someone...anyone...the janitor...an intern...a poor working mother in Pakistan...can make a buck (exactly $1US) selling it.
Hmm...tempting. But I think we should all of us get over the idea that individual users should be fined or abused somehow because of flaws in the system. For I think we all here can agree that the Internet, inherently trustful as it is, is flawed. It was a great 70's idea of every host trusting every other that just wasn't ready for prime time.
I recall the gnashing of teeth when the Internet went public back-in-the-day. Pundits were forcasting all sorts of doom and gloom involving what happens when a free service falls into the hands of corporations. And maybe there have been abuses from corporations (spammers are a business too). But I don't think anyone predicted what really came to happen; trust became a liability. And as a result public email would die from the weight of its own success.
Future systems will need to have learned from this episode; trust no one.
The airlines gave that much no doubt because they were asked to. And the reason why they were asked to is because it takes a lot of data points on an individual to fully cross-link and cross-reference all the scattered databases that are used to define who someone is and what they are doing recently.
Yeah it is excessive. I don't like it at all. It is spooky. But it happens all the time though generally on a smaller scale.
This is just one time when it was on a huge scale, and so we found out.
Before very long there will be a lot of strangers in the world (I mean all over the world, including offshore outsourced data mining facilities) that know more about the Total You than anyone you actually know personally, outside yourself. That's one of the reasons why privacy laws are such a total flipping joke in the absence of data secrecy.
It's probably better just to stay out of the databases if you don't want your whole life being dredged up in the next terrorist-inspired data dragnet.