Cheap options really. Some stuff you can get an a yardsale and being second hand just adds class:
-- wireless -- a real lounge with poofy lounge chairs to work in, and with either skylights or a large, north-facing window for ambient light -- coffee "lab" with full-function espresso machine -- a pool table -- hi-quality LCD monitors throughout -- stylish whiteboards everywhere, floor to ceiling to look like wall panels, for ad hoc meetings and planning -- Aeron chairs (yes they really do save your ass) -- hardwood floors (carpet stinks) -- a combination of open area, cubes and secure offices to suit individual tastes and changing needs -- a large fish tank with a cleaning contract -- an orange cat -- a yellow dog
and that's just the environment. There's also recuring cost items like a fully stocked fridg, a small functional kitchen, free soda, etc that people seem to crave but for my part I don't care about food and drink. Comfy chairs, good lighting, some way to get a stretch and visit with coworkers.
It may be invalid now to point to one party or another and say they are in the pockets of business.
Both major parties are in special interest pockets, deeply. Nobody gets elected in the US without huge monetary contributions from businesses. And those businesses include media and entertainment providers.
I don't vote Republican myself, but these days I can hardly justify voting Democrat. It is very disturbing, the landscape we face, where business have the rights of individuals including the right to influence politics via elections.
I suppose I am now of the same mind as Thomas Jefferson, who I understand pretty much imagined that we would scrap our government every few generations, rewrite the Constitution, and start over. Other than starting over from scratch, I have no idea how we will get our government back into the service of the people and out of the tentacles of business.
Failing that I suppose we could simply ignore Federal government the way we might ignore a constitutional monarchy, as a quaint holdover of another age. But the Feds *do* pass laws and treaties and they *could* send around the Army to enforce those treaties if they wanted to. Hmm....sounds a bit like the colonials and King George in 1776?
1. MS-OS team finds or is alerted to 'sploit. 2. MS-OS team intern walks across the hall and alerts AV team. 3. MS-AV team issues a 'sploit sig, that goes out over the hourly MS-AV update buried within a dozen other sigs concerning the usual run of worm/viri. No other 'sploit-of-the-day announcement is made. 4. MS-OS team orders pizza and beer, and continues work on Longhorn. 5. Within the hour, third-party companies get helldesk calls from 100,000 users of their product that just broke because it does something that looks like malicious activity. They blame Microsoft, and set about patching their software against the MS-AV behavior. 6. End-users of third-party software buy software updates and stop blaming MS for their problems.
So is this the end of Windows code patches and the start of third-party patches and updates? I suspect it is far easier to reconfig a built-in MS-AV firewall against exploits and worms than to try and hunt down bad code in their 5 million plus lines of such, even if it pretty much will hose someone else.
It makes a crude form of sense. It is also admission of defeat at the OS layer. That no doubt is healthy. The 'hiding behind a fig leaf' approach has proven less than healthy.
Other Things We Can Expect to See(TM):
-- MS will market their product as superior to other AV because it is more closely integrated with OS update processes; -- MS marketing will position their damaged OS as 'self-healing' when loaded with MS-AV; -- MS will convince retailers to bundle MS-AV for consumer systems and cite the growing consumer demand for 'self-healing systems'; -- CPUs will bog down under the AV load as MS-AV spends all its time updating itself and blocking exploits, and so Intel will issue a new chipset with MS-AV acceleration or even MS-AV in firmware, thus driving additional sales of both Intel motherboards and new MSWindows installations; -- Longhorn will ship with the software formerly known as MS-AV built into the OS layer, the need for this based on consumer demand for a self-healing OS; -- Most 3rd-party AV vendors will go out of business; -- Engineering 'exploit reactive systems' around Longhorn will become a new business model for retailers, replacing the idea that one should correct vulnerable code at the outset; -- The quality of code and operating systems will fall from the discussion of what is or is not a good system or a good software company; -- Non-technical types will stop seeing MSWindows as a problem, and instead will yammer about which hardware and CPU combination provides the best reactive defense. -- Virus and worm authors will resume the old practice of writing exploits against hardware, or against firmware;
Is this better than what we have now? I'm not sure either way. But it sounds costly.
I live in Silly Valley and my wife and I use cell phones exclusively. But we have a land line because...we wanted DSL! (And NO we do not have cable, for cable is 3vi1.) They wouldn't even talk to us about DSL until we got a land line for something like $15/month. Since it's there we do have a phone on it for emergency purposes (whatever that means) don't use it for calls and we turn the ringer off to avoid evening telemarketer abuse. Waste of resources and money.
If this ruling stands my land line is history. Now, how will I have it terminated without losing my DSL? Sure there is no connection between the two, but mark my words SBC will find a way to make this hard for me, just like they did when I brought the DSL in originally.
Sort of OT, but here's something I never really understood; the notion that banging people over the head with something makes it...popular? What's up with that? If I'm listening to the radio, and the station is playing the same 32 songs all day, I change the station. If I start to hear a song all the time to the point were hearing the first 8 notes immediately fills my head with the entire song to the exclusion of all other thought, I change the station. That kind of over-n-over-n-over-n-WTF-again gets on my *nerves* man.
But I guess I actually *listen* to the radio when it is on and I take control of the thing when it annoys me. I also pay attention to other aspects of my environment, like who is walking behind me and strange sounds outside. It's an instinct for self preservation, a hold over from ancient times. Protects me from surprise, and I guess from being brainwashed as well, cuz none of my clothes have designer logos on them.
Peoples' instincts must be dulled to nothing. Their minds idling over like mill wheels, round and round grinding the same grist all day. Why does anyone put up with being treated like a mass of thoughtless pulp by hungry, tentacled corporations who want your money, and hence your labor?
Is this a hazard that comes with soft living? Or maybe 15,000 years of evolution without meaningful predators coming after you all the time? Or did TV and consumerism really, finally, destroy our minds?
OK...when I think about this matter there are some parallels between computer/network technology development and the discovery/reinvention of biotech.
1) Both fields began as, and largely remain, academic pursuits;
2) Both deal with systems of enormous complexity that exhibit emergent properties;
3) Both focus on the macro-scale, visible results of the interactions of a huge number of microscopic, essentially invisible, components.
I could go on. But you get the point.
Single companies, and single individuals (aside from a few rare geniuses) do not adequately deal with systems having such characteristics as those just listed. It is all simply too big, too fragmented and too obscure for one human mind to either anticipate or encompass all at once. Advances in these fields *emerge* from the shared thoughts of countless individuals, often over hundreds of years. Via writing, speaking, teaching, email, chat,/. etc, we together study what is out there, just beyond the reach of any one. As through a glass, darkly.
Here is the real danger; we allow commercial enterprises to dominate the field of [network technology | biotech ] and to allow their narrow, myopic view of the subject, driven by greed of possession and control, to lock humanity out from the only means of adequate study, which is collective. If that happens, then we will for a long time content ourselves to nibble around the edges of [network technology | biotech] waiting for some greater genius to pull away from the throng and raise up our eyes to what is really possible, which if we are unfortunate may never even happen. It is not all about money. Sometimes it is about doing the right thing for the greater good. And generally doing the right thing means sharing, even though you stand to give up control. [Network technology | Biotech] has great potential, but that potential will be realized and acted upon by all of us, together, freely, and with knowledge of our personal responsibility to contribute to the progress of our kind. All great things have become great in this way, all triffling things have become forgotten because the majority of humanity did not participate. What is open is shared and what is shared is preserved and built upon. All else vanishes into nothing and is lost.
Though not a _personal_ computer, I like many at the time ran programs in time-share environments at a university. When I started college in 1977 I got an account on the PDP-11/45 system, which came with some personal storage, access to BASIC, and all of 8K of core. Before that I had never touched a computer system. When I started serious projects I applied for more core, and got 16K.
Later as a graduate student I programmed Apple][ systems in hybrid BASIC/assembly to do "high-speed" statistics against memory-resident databases I designed myself. Those boxen had around 64K addressable system memory for programs you load from disk and another 64K you could use with high-memory tricks to store your data or routines. That would be using hi-mem as something of an L1 cache against the floppy disk subsystem, as it were. Coincidently (or not) 64K is about the amount of L1 cache of the processor I'm using right now.
In some ways, we've grown sloppy about RAM to the point nobody noticed that RAM became to the modern CPU what a floppy was to an Apple][; a slow but neccesary storage medium that acts as a loading point for the area of memory where the actual work is done. An Apple]['s hi-mem was several orders of magnitude faster than reading data off the floppy. As it is for L1 cache against system DRAM.
Today programmers are re-learning to write for 64K of memory (L1 cache) and treating board-level DRAM as "storage". This is being treated as an emerging technology triumph which it probably is, but really the challenge has been around a very long time.
Been using TurboTax online from my Mac running OSX (*BSD) for years now. It's a great service and I do not even think about buying tax software.
Taxes are one of the few times where it makes sense to run an online application. They can keep tax data and rules up to date to the last minute without issuing and distributing patches, and retain my data even if I change PCs over the years.
Not here to pitch their product, just trying to address the question of when it makes sense to have software on your harddrive vs software on an app server. As far as it goes, one can run any software from a remote app server and this might make more sense in the future, but right now tax software is a no-brainer.
Wired carried a story on this very topic last year (or maybe the year before). I don't have the issue handy. It was nicely done, and was the first inkling I'd had that these GPUs where some serious hardware looking for a problem to solve.
It would be interesting to see some of the distributed computing efforts (seti@home, etc) take advantage of GPUs if there is anything there of use.
The Max Smart jokes and GPS mentions made me think of something. If we're putting electronics in shoes, then here's what I would like to see:
Kids love those shoes that have flashing lights. OK fine, put electronics in shoes such that they can also connect into the cell network (using whatever they do to ping the towers) to allow lost or abducted children to be tracked down by the authorities. Sure, if they take off their shoes (or they are removed for them) then you lose track. But at least you would have the last location of the shoe.
Yeah I know, we Americans worry too much. But I still think it would be a cool hack.
Guess I better go write up the patent application now...
We're still in the "hobbyist" phase of virus creation. Folk do this for the same reason that people used to write their own software; because it is l33t. We have recently seen some more "applied" virus writting, as when a virus sets up a zombie computer for spam uses later. Or even, when one virus goes after another.
Now imagine a real "virus industry". There would be serious R&D, business plans, virus development models, project management, the works. Probably even some code QA and testing. Why? Because there would be money in it. Don't know what the money would be, be if there were to be some then the "virus industry" would emerge overnight.
The idea that a virus could be stealthy (or clever) enough to avoid detection and just sit around on infected PCs is part of the transtition from hobby to a business. I've been noticing that already there is a sort of "dark Internet" of zombies that can do pretty much whatever someone needs them to do, enabled by viruses. Aside from spam, here are some other uses for those machines:
-- set up virtual casinos that dissolve instantly when the vice cops arrive. -- set up distributed supercomputers for unlawful uses, like cracking access codes or breaking IPSec packets -- have zombies not only monitor their users, but via something like ethereal monitor the broader Internet for traffic within their subnet. Imagine Carnivore on crack, and in the hands of the Mafia. -- use zombies to launch focused, sustained DDoS attacks against adversary nations -- use zombies as advanced positions to launch new rounds of virus outbreaks with split second timing and absolute accuracy, in this way overcoming most defensive responses in the first 15 seconds. Build a newer, stronger zombie network each time. slowly take over the Internet....
Profit
It's coming, people. You know it and I know it. Every habitat has its unseen underbelly, its fetid swamp, its decaying compost, and the Internet is about to get its own sewer system, full of rats and desease and decay.
Will we care? Nope. It will just be there and we'll eventually learn to live with it, or use it to our own purposes.
making something useful out of nothing special
on
Diamond Age Approaching?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
So nanofactories will replace corporate factories and this is _bad_ to the current power structure so government won't let it happen so we're doomed to be slaves to the heartless System.
I have an idea. Forget about the nanofactories for now. Go to the hardware store and purchase some basic tools. Saw, hammer, the like. Find some suitable dried wood, old fences are a good supply (get permissions first!) Buy a book on woodworking. Try a few projects.
And never buy another stick of furniture. See who cares. Other than family and friends nobody will care. And you'll have fun.
And this: Buy a sewing machine, pick up broadcloth on the cheap. Make clothes. Other than family and friends nobody will care. You'll have fun.
Learn to cook. Learn to repair engines. Learn to garden. Learn to teach your children. Walk. Ride a bike.
You are small, compared to a corporation and a government you are nano-scale. Your life is tiny, your labors are tiny, your production is tiny, your marketing reach is zero to none. You are a factory, but on the nano-scale. Make what you need yourself, say good-bye to Nike, and fall from sight.
And you won't give a thought to what happens with nanofactories 20 or 30 or 80 years from now, because you will _be_ a nanofactory.
Interesting. However, I've always said that the best way to learn how to solve a class of problems is to teach a computer how to solve them. Now in my day, that meant studying the problem in great depth, writing software using primitive tools to take input and provide meaningful output as well as crunch the data, and then testing the program using as benchmark similar problems you have resolved yourself long-hand. In this way it can take a week to teach the computer to solve the problem, and you have essentially mastered it in the process. Which, as I say, was the whole point.
Probably doesn't hold up when the computer is a scientific calculator with the logic already built into it. I guess a lot has changed.
That's why my own children will learn to write programs before they get a calculator to play with.
Well really, the Chinese have all those prisoners and all, the ones working as slave labor in factories pumping out products for their own middle class. They can do testing on those people for free. And when they die, they can just go "arrest" some more. There are so many people, after all, and the poor ones are always engaged in some form of unsanctioned larceny or political action.
Yes it is entirely sick. I am reminded of Jonathan Swith's "A Modest Proposal" regarding the Irish lowerclass. Wherein the modest proposal was to have the English upperclass deal with a number of issues regarding the Irish, such as over population, petty crime, poor health and crowded schools, by eating Irish children. Gross, yes, but at least it was political commentary and not, as now, a proposed form of capitalist expression.
What a jarring transition. The third world was for 100 years a hotbed of Marxist and Leninist agitation. Power to the People. Classless society. Communist and socialist regimes where the norm rather than the exception. Now they are prepared to set their own people up for medical experiments in the name of creating a middle class and a powerful economy. As if Dr. Mengele had just stepped back into history after a brief vacation in the Azores.
Someone is going to look back one day and brand us all as lunatics.
I'll predict there will be a whole slew of similar reports from scholars amd government agencies about why enjoying your own music your own way on your own music player is either unAmerican, unhealthy, damaging to Our Way of Life, playing into the hands of terrorists, etc.
Because the music industry is horrified that the album, that high priced gold plated sacred cow of music commerce, is doomed. Artists make songs and the music labels make albums. End users listen to songs, but must buy albums to get them. The songs sell themselves, and users choke down the price of albums to get the songs.
The middle man, the record labels, touch all the money and most of it sticks to their fingers, but without the album there would be no middle man as such, and increasingly the online music stores are getting set up to cut the middle out. Since the music industry is mostly talentless marketing wonks who otherwise would have to market uncool things like vacuum cleaners, the extinction of the album as a concept would be a disaster and really cut down on the number of great parties and available women they have enjoyed up to now.
I would tend to agree with the outcome...but not with the idea that anyone is buttering bread with the USPTO. Those guys seem to be clueless as regards this topic, or at least they are following guidelines that themselves lack clue, but I don't know how they could be bought outright. Afterall they don't run for election; their jobs are more secure than anyone in Congress, probably. Say what you want to about pencil pushers in gov'mint, but they do follow their own rules like a bunch of mindless Turing machines.
I think that, once they get this one right (which might take years) they'll hew to the line like F/OSS zealots. Here's hoping, anyway.
There might be a genetic thing going on here. Check this out.
If you've been following recent thinking on evolution (SJ Gould et al.) then you will be familiar with the notion that evolution of a species does not necessarily take place in the middle of the herd where there is a lot of mixing of genes, but on the edges where small populations scratch out an existence. On the edges of a range, where habitat is by definition more diverse, less optimal and life a bit more harsh, there is adaptation of a sort to suit the situation. If those marginal populations remain separated from the mass of the population then adaptation proceeds apace, though it is constantly diluted by random reinjection of "mainstream" genetic material from the core. Still no evolution as such, but some diversity.
Now imagine that the (more or less) homogeneous population core getting fat on the best habitat suffers a collapse. Perhaps a new disease, a parasite, a new predator. Or the resources that had supported the majority of the species phenotype disappears. They are all the same, after all, so whatever hits very many of them hard can hit them all. Suddenly homogeneity is fatal, the population core drops out and the "edges" become all that is left...to become the new mainstream by default. You might actually end up with many new species generated over a few generations, due to all the fringe populations becoming now entirely disconnected both from the dampening effect of the core as well as from each other.
Now, about humans.
Though human evolution is complicated by our intelligence (in that we can somewhat avoid all that "natural selection" ickiness the other animals are faced with) it also holds that our intelligence may be the result of geeks. Yeah, I thought you'd like this part.
Intelligence is no big gift to life in the mainstream. The smart ones might have the best toys, but they're not "understood" and their motions appear random and unproductive to their peers. Imagine how someone must have looked inventing the first pushcart, or trying to domesticate a wolf...you get the picture; nutty professor. This is important because mating rituals in both humans and simple animals center on how well individuals can signify their superior properties as a mate. This is one of the factors that creates elaborate mating rituals in animals of all types. But there is no intelligence involved in mating rituals, and actually being independent-minded and a little eccentric will tend to mean that you may being doing the ritual creatively but you are not doing the ritual correctly, so you are not getting the best mate. Everyone reading this knows exactly what I am talking about.
If a geek does get a mate then the mate is probably geeky as well, in some fashion or another, and one might expect the pair of them are shuffled off to the edge of the village where they can do their geeky thing out of sight of the elders, while Ken and Barbie lead the ritual. (All except for the witches, who either became important members of the village subculture or were burned at the stake, depending on the period of history.)
However, not being the same as others has one (and probably only one) signal advantage; you were not invited to the very party where everyone drank the Koolaid. Maybe you are off beating your head against a tree in frustration, or wandering desolate in the wilderness, or you and your mate are enjoying a quiet if desperate life in a meadow just over the hill. Whatever. The village is wiped out by a plague, or a war, or during a famine, and Ken and Barbie and all their rituals with them. Leaving the desperate but independent geeks to carry on, both to their surprise and horror. Not a pretty picture, nobody wanted it that way, and Ken and Barbie where great people with perfect behaviors that were the model for the species. But the way it works is that the edges sometimes find themselves not just apart but suddenly desperately alone, indeed maybe all that is left of something they never were a part of, and
The idea that US corporations will suffer due to lost American wages and buying power is not correct. They know perfectly well who will be buying their products next year, and it won't be out-of-work US workers. The new big market for everything -- toothbrushes, computers, network gear, tampons, hardwoods, everything -- is Asia. There are about 10 times as many Asians (all told) than there are US consumers and though historically they have been poor that is changing.
If the entire US consumer base fell flat tomorrow due to unemployment then there might be a problem for US companies. But it's not going to fall flat for another 5-10 years; the US consumer base will be propped up by tax breaks, war, low interest rates and promises for a while before reality sets in. By then the movement of American know-how, capacity and labor to Asia will have happened; wages and disposable income in Asia will rise, costs of products will drop to match, and Asians will be buying 10 times more products and services than American consumers could ever have dreamed. The global corporations would have turned the corner and in a single motion both created and then exploited the biggest consumer base in the history of our species.
Sorry, but we're doomed brothers and sisters. We're just not the right demographic. We didn't reproduce enough.
Before anyone sheds a tear for the lost American consumer, a similar thing happened in Europe and England toward the end of the industrial revolution, when America had become the biggest consumer of goods and services. Industry and business moved to the New World. The Old World fell on hard times, but eventually got it's collective act together and now many Europeans enjoy a quality of life that most Americans, shorn of their free time and tied to impossible productivity goals like sweatshop workers, can only yearn for.
For a while you burn bright, then you burn out. And eventually you get over burning all the time and you settle for living a normal life.
Let the Asians carry the torch a while if they care to. Frankly I can't recommend it, but hey they should have a chance. As for me and my wife and children, we're cutting living expenses, buying clothes at the thrift shop, moved to a cheaper rental, and enjoying simple pleasures like working in the garden and riding our bicycles. We're poor but we're together and we're happy. I took a teaching position at a small college and I'm not too worried about being outsourced again.
That's true. And when the middle managers are outsourced to Singapore then it will be just the upper managers in the US. But what do they really know? All their middle managers are now in Singapore. So the Board will fire the US upper managers and hire replacements in Singapore. But the CEO won't have day-to-day interactions with most of the company at that point. So the CEO will be placed on the Board and all the managment will be from Singapore. Only the Board and most of the stockholders will be in the US.
20 years later: All the major US IT companies are entirely managed from outsource companies, with only Board and stockholders in the US.
Then all the rich IT workers in Singapore will buy up the companies in hostile takeovers as aging American stockholders liquidate at a bargain, kick out the Board, install their fellows in leadership...and we will have finally exported wholesale a trillion+ dollar industry in record time. The Roman Empire took several hundred years to pull that off.
And this is...a good thing? Looks like giving away the farm. Well at least the Singaporians won't contribute to the Republican Party so then maybe we'll elect...oh wait, I suppose they will contribute illegally, or by proxy. Never mind. We really have given away the farm.
Yes, and it is my birthday as well. I was teased about it in school, probably part of the reason I don't think much of birthdays. Except my own kids, who were born on sensible days.
We tend to think of the M$ monopoly, and the subsequent homogenous pool of hosts, as being the reason for the rapid spread of worms. Actually, the monopoly means that most virus will be targeted for that platform because it is obvious, but a virus well targeted even for a niche platform like ISS can take off because there internet itself is now almost completely transparent.
What this suggests is that the combination of 1) bandwidth commonly available and 2) CPU speed are now more than sufficient for a virus to find almost all of the hosts it needs to anywhere these are on the internet. When a few early, fast hosts can spew 11,000,000 pps to random IP addresses then it doesn't take long to find what one is looking for.
No doubt this is part of the reason for the observation that when 2% of Windows sysadmins fail to patch for a known vuln, then the next worm to come along and exploit that vuln has a field day. 2% of a really big number is in turn a lot of hosts, millions of Windows hosts for example.
And a million of anything, be it Mac OSX or NetScreen or Checkpoint or BeOS or OS/2 or Amiga or anything, is fair game when a smartly written virus can get them all.
I guess I'll have to go back and review my Mac for system updates.
"Fair" is overused in this discussion as fairness does not enter into it. There is nothing fair or even equitable about most businesses even if their leaders are pious and temperate. Business models in their modern form are merely the domesticated versions of piracy, prostitution, murder-for-hire and fraud that has characterized 8,000 years history of the exchange of goods and services we call commerce in trade. The MBAs might disagree, but they've all read their Machiavelli primers too. As have I.
That said, business is not allowed to become government. It is only somewhat sarcastic to state that governments reserve for themselves the right to dictate what people can do, say or spend their money on. But businesses are *constantly* trying to elevate themselves into forms of government as that gives them just enough power to be almost as profitable as their shareholders expect. And this is where anti-trust law comes in. The government needs a tool to castrate any business that starts to dictate what people can do, say or spend their money on. And the shareholders can go to hell.
The EU, probably because it is a little new at this government thing, having recently been formed as it were, and being anyway something of a horse of another color as it were, is no doubt quite ready to show that it is bigger than a business, and has castration rights the same as any other government. The notion of setting an example of Microsoft, therefore, is more than slightly chilling; there is in theory no end to the benefit the EU could glean from a really nice, long, public castration of Microsoft.
It is as if Machiavelli was just elected Pope and, since he is not so pious as to be loved automatically, he must resort to a show of power to make sure he won't be undermined. So he fetches up in irons a lesser lord of a local domain who is known to abuse his power with the groundlings. Pope Machiavelli then declares him a heretic, confiscates his belongings, throws him in jail, threatens every day to kill him in painful ways, forces him to confess to all sorts of crimes real and imagined, to disown his birthright and his family, to sign over his wealth to the Pope, and then suddenly lets him out to wander the lands as a penniless begger spreading the word that the Pope is both powerful and merciful.
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Cheap options really. Some stuff you can get an a yardsale and being second hand just adds class:
-- wireless
-- a real lounge with poofy lounge chairs to work in, and with either skylights or a large, north-facing window for ambient light
-- coffee "lab" with full-function espresso machine
-- a pool table
-- hi-quality LCD monitors throughout
-- stylish whiteboards everywhere, floor to ceiling to look like wall panels, for ad hoc meetings and planning
-- Aeron chairs (yes they really do save your ass)
-- hardwood floors (carpet stinks)
-- a combination of open area, cubes and secure offices to suit individual tastes and changing needs
-- a large fish tank with a cleaning contract
-- an orange cat
-- a yellow dog
and that's just the environment. There's also recuring cost items like a fully stocked fridg, a small functional kitchen, free soda, etc that people seem to crave but for my part I don't care about food and drink. Comfy chairs, good lighting, some way to get a stretch and visit with coworkers.
It may be invalid now to point to one party or another and say they are in the pockets of business.
Both major parties are in special interest pockets, deeply. Nobody gets elected in the US without huge monetary contributions from businesses. And those businesses include media and entertainment providers.
I don't vote Republican myself, but these days I can hardly justify voting Democrat. It is very disturbing, the landscape we face, where business have the rights of individuals including the right to influence politics via elections.
I suppose I am now of the same mind as Thomas Jefferson, who I understand pretty much imagined that we would scrap our government every few generations, rewrite the Constitution, and start over. Other than starting over from scratch, I have no idea how we will get our government back into the service of the people and out of the tentacles of business.
Failing that I suppose we could simply ignore Federal government the way we might ignore a constitutional monarchy, as a quaint holdover of another age. But the Feds *do* pass laws and treaties and they *could* send around the Army to enforce those treaties if they wanted to. Hmm....sounds a bit like the colonials and King George in 1776?
...in practice:
1. MS-OS team finds or is alerted to 'sploit.
2. MS-OS team intern walks across the hall and alerts AV team.
3. MS-AV team issues a 'sploit sig, that goes out over the hourly MS-AV update buried within a dozen other sigs concerning the usual run of worm/viri. No other 'sploit-of-the-day announcement is made.
4. MS-OS team orders pizza and beer, and continues work on Longhorn.
5. Within the hour, third-party companies get helldesk calls from 100,000 users of their product that just broke because it does something that looks like malicious activity. They blame Microsoft, and set about patching their software against the MS-AV behavior.
6. End-users of third-party software buy software updates and stop blaming MS for their problems.
So is this the end of Windows code patches and the start of third-party patches and updates? I suspect it is far easier to reconfig a built-in MS-AV firewall against exploits and worms than to try and hunt down bad code in their 5 million plus lines of such, even if it pretty much will hose someone else.
It makes a crude form of sense. It is also admission of defeat at the OS layer. That no doubt is healthy. The 'hiding behind a fig leaf' approach has proven less than healthy.
Other Things We Can Expect to See(TM):
-- MS will market their product as superior to other AV because it is more closely integrated with OS update processes;
-- MS marketing will position their damaged OS as 'self-healing' when loaded with MS-AV;
-- MS will convince retailers to bundle MS-AV for consumer systems and cite the growing consumer demand for 'self-healing systems';
-- CPUs will bog down under the AV load as MS-AV spends all its time updating itself and blocking exploits, and so Intel will issue a new chipset with MS-AV acceleration or even MS-AV in firmware, thus driving additional sales of both Intel motherboards and new MSWindows installations;
-- Longhorn will ship with the software formerly known as MS-AV built into the OS layer, the need for this based on consumer demand for a self-healing OS;
-- Most 3rd-party AV vendors will go out of business;
-- Engineering 'exploit reactive systems' around Longhorn will become a new business model for retailers, replacing the idea that one should correct vulnerable code at the outset;
-- The quality of code and operating systems will fall from the discussion of what is or is not a good system or a good software company;
-- Non-technical types will stop seeing MSWindows as a problem, and instead will yammer about which hardware and CPU combination provides the best reactive defense.
-- Virus and worm authors will resume the old practice of writing exploits against hardware, or against firmware;
Is this better than what we have now? I'm not sure either way. But it sounds costly.
I live in Silly Valley and my wife and I use cell phones exclusively. But we have a land line because...we wanted DSL! (And NO we do not have cable, for cable is 3vi1.) They wouldn't even talk to us about DSL until we got a land line for something like $15/month. Since it's there we do have a phone on it for emergency purposes (whatever that means) don't use it for calls and we turn the ringer off to avoid evening telemarketer abuse. Waste of resources and money.
If this ruling stands my land line is history. Now, how will I have it terminated without losing my DSL? Sure there is no connection between the two, but mark my words SBC will find a way to make this hard for me, just like they did when I brought the DSL in originally.
Sort of OT, but here's something I never really understood; the notion that banging people over the head with something makes it...popular? What's up with that? If I'm listening to the radio, and the station is playing the same 32 songs all day, I change the station. If I start to hear a song all the time to the point were hearing the first 8 notes immediately fills my head with the entire song to the exclusion of all other thought, I change the station. That kind of over-n-over-n-over-n-WTF-again gets on my *nerves* man.
But I guess I actually *listen* to the radio when it is on and I take control of the thing when it annoys me. I also pay attention to other aspects of my environment, like who is walking behind me and strange sounds outside. It's an instinct for self preservation, a hold over from ancient times. Protects me from surprise, and I guess from being brainwashed as well, cuz none of my clothes have designer logos on them.
Peoples' instincts must be dulled to nothing. Their minds idling over like mill wheels, round and round grinding the same grist all day. Why does anyone put up with being treated like a mass of thoughtless pulp by hungry, tentacled corporations who want your money, and hence your labor?
Is this a hazard that comes with soft living? Or maybe 15,000 years of evolution without meaningful predators coming after you all the time? Or did TV and consumerism really, finally, destroy our minds?
OK...when I think about this matter there are some parallels between computer/network technology development and the discovery/reinvention of biotech.
/. etc, we together study what is out there, just beyond the reach of any one. As through a glass, darkly.
1) Both fields began as, and largely remain, academic pursuits;
2) Both deal with systems of enormous complexity that exhibit emergent properties;
3) Both focus on the macro-scale, visible results of the interactions of a huge number of microscopic, essentially invisible, components.
I could go on. But you get the point.
Single companies, and single individuals (aside from a few rare geniuses) do not adequately deal with systems having such characteristics as those just listed. It is all simply too big, too fragmented and too obscure for one human mind to either anticipate or encompass all at once. Advances in these fields *emerge* from the shared thoughts of countless individuals, often over hundreds of years. Via writing, speaking, teaching, email, chat,
Here is the real danger; we allow commercial enterprises to dominate the field of [network technology | biotech ] and to allow their narrow, myopic view of the subject, driven by greed of possession and control, to lock humanity out from the only means of adequate study, which is collective. If that happens, then we will for a long time content ourselves to nibble around the edges of [network technology | biotech] waiting for some greater genius to pull away from the throng and raise up our eyes to what is really possible, which if we are unfortunate may never even happen. It is not all about money. Sometimes it is about doing the right thing for the greater good. And generally doing the right thing means sharing, even though you stand to give up control. [Network technology | Biotech] has great potential, but that potential will be realized and acted upon by all of us, together, freely, and with knowledge of our personal responsibility to contribute to the progress of our kind. All great things have become great in this way, all triffling things have become forgotten because the majority of humanity did not participate. What is open is shared and what is shared is preserved and built upon. All else vanishes into nothing and is lost.
Nicely done. You write textbooks, I hope?
Though not a _personal_ computer, I like many at the time ran programs in time-share environments at a university. When I started college in 1977 I got an account on the PDP-11/45 system, which came with some personal storage, access to BASIC, and all of 8K of core. Before that I had never touched a computer system. When I started serious projects I applied for more core, and got 16K.
Later as a graduate student I programmed Apple][ systems in hybrid BASIC/assembly to do "high-speed" statistics against memory-resident databases I designed myself. Those boxen had around 64K addressable system memory for programs you load from disk and another 64K you could use with high-memory tricks to store your data or routines. That would be using hi-mem as something of an L1 cache against the floppy disk subsystem, as it were. Coincidently (or not) 64K is about the amount of L1 cache of the processor I'm using right now.
In some ways, we've grown sloppy about RAM to the point nobody noticed that RAM became to the modern CPU what a floppy was to an Apple][; a slow but neccesary storage medium that acts as a loading point for the area of memory where the actual work is done. An Apple]['s hi-mem was several orders of magnitude faster than reading data off the floppy. As it is for L1 cache against system DRAM.
Today programmers are re-learning to write for 64K of memory (L1 cache) and treating board-level DRAM as "storage". This is being treated as an emerging technology triumph which it probably is, but really the challenge has been around a very long time.
Been using TurboTax online from my Mac running OSX (*BSD) for years now. It's a great service and I do not even think about buying tax software.
Taxes are one of the few times where it makes sense to run an online application. They can keep tax data and rules up to date to the last minute without issuing and distributing patches, and retain my data even if I change PCs over the years.
Not here to pitch their product, just trying to address the question of when it makes sense to have software on your harddrive vs software on an app server. As far as it goes, one can run any software from a remote app server and this might make more sense in the future, but right now tax software is a no-brainer.
Wired carried a story on this very topic last year (or maybe the year before). I don't have the issue handy. It was nicely done, and was the first inkling I'd had that these GPUs where some serious hardware looking for a problem to solve.
It would be interesting to see some of the distributed computing efforts (seti@home, etc) take advantage of GPUs if there is anything there of use.
The Max Smart jokes and GPS mentions made me think of something. If we're putting electronics in shoes, then here's what I would like to see:
Kids love those shoes that have flashing lights. OK fine, put electronics in shoes such that they can also connect into the cell network (using whatever they do to ping the towers) to allow lost or abducted children to be tracked down by the authorities. Sure, if they take off their shoes (or they are removed for them) then you lose track. But at least you would have the last location of the shoe.
Yeah I know, we Americans worry too much. But I still think it would be a cool hack.
Guess I better go write up the patent application now...
We're still in the "hobbyist" phase of virus creation. Folk do this for the same reason that people used to write their own software; because it is l33t. We have recently seen some more "applied" virus writting, as when a virus sets up a zombie computer for spam uses later. Or even, when one virus goes after another.
...
Now imagine a real "virus industry". There would be serious R&D, business plans, virus development models, project management, the works. Probably even some code QA and testing. Why? Because there would be money in it. Don't know what the money would be, be if there were to be some then the "virus industry" would emerge overnight.
The idea that a virus could be stealthy (or clever) enough to avoid detection and just sit around on infected PCs is part of the transtition from hobby to a business. I've been noticing that already there is a sort of "dark Internet" of zombies that can do pretty much whatever someone needs them to do, enabled by viruses. Aside from spam, here are some other uses for those machines:
-- set up virtual casinos that dissolve instantly when the vice cops arrive.
-- set up distributed supercomputers for unlawful uses, like cracking access codes or breaking IPSec packets
-- have zombies not only monitor their users, but via something like ethereal monitor the broader Internet for traffic within their subnet. Imagine Carnivore on crack, and in the hands of the Mafia.
-- use zombies to launch focused, sustained DDoS attacks against adversary nations
-- use zombies as advanced positions to launch new rounds of virus outbreaks with split second timing and absolute accuracy, in this way overcoming most defensive responses in the first 15 seconds. Build a newer, stronger zombie network each time. slowly take over the Internet.
Profit
It's coming, people. You know it and I know it. Every habitat has its unseen underbelly, its fetid swamp, its decaying compost, and the Internet is about to get its own sewer system, full of rats and desease and decay.
Will we care? Nope. It will just be there and we'll eventually learn to live with it, or use it to our own purposes.
So nanofactories will replace corporate factories and this is _bad_ to the current power structure so government won't let it happen so we're doomed to be slaves to the heartless System.
I have an idea. Forget about the nanofactories for now. Go to the hardware store and purchase some basic tools. Saw, hammer, the like. Find some suitable dried wood, old fences are a good supply (get permissions first!) Buy a book on woodworking. Try a few projects.
And never buy another stick of furniture. See who cares. Other than family and friends nobody will care. And you'll have fun.
And this: Buy a sewing machine, pick up broadcloth on the cheap. Make clothes. Other than family and friends nobody will care. You'll have fun.
Learn to cook. Learn to repair engines. Learn to garden. Learn to teach your children. Walk. Ride a bike.
You are small, compared to a corporation and a government you are nano-scale. Your life is tiny, your labors are tiny, your production is tiny, your marketing reach is zero to none. You are a factory, but on the nano-scale. Make what you need yourself, say good-bye to Nike, and fall from sight.
And you won't give a thought to what happens with nanofactories 20 or 30 or 80 years from now, because you will _be_ a nanofactory.
Interesting. However, I've always said that the best way to learn how to solve a class of problems is to teach a computer how to solve them. Now in my day, that meant studying the problem in great depth, writing software using primitive tools to take input and provide meaningful output as well as crunch the data, and then testing the program using as benchmark similar problems you have resolved yourself long-hand. In this way it can take a week to teach the computer to solve the problem, and you have essentially mastered it in the process. Which, as I say, was the whole point.
Probably doesn't hold up when the computer is a scientific calculator with the logic already built into it. I guess a lot has changed.
That's why my own children will learn to write programs before they get a calculator to play with.
Well really, the Chinese have all those prisoners and all, the ones working as slave labor in factories pumping out products for their own middle class. They can do testing on those people for free. And when they die, they can just go "arrest" some more. There are so many people, after all, and the poor ones are always engaged in some form of unsanctioned larceny or political action.
Yes it is entirely sick. I am reminded of Jonathan Swith's "A Modest Proposal" regarding the Irish lowerclass. Wherein the modest proposal was to have the English upperclass deal with a number of issues regarding the Irish, such as over population, petty crime, poor health and crowded schools, by eating Irish children. Gross, yes, but at least it was political commentary and not, as now, a proposed form of capitalist expression.
What a jarring transition. The third world was for 100 years a hotbed of Marxist and Leninist agitation. Power to the People. Classless society. Communist and socialist regimes where the norm rather than the exception. Now they are prepared to set their own people up for medical experiments in the name of creating a middle class and a powerful economy. As if Dr. Mengele had just stepped back into history after a brief vacation in the Azores.
Someone is going to look back one day and brand us all as lunatics.
I'll predict there will be a whole slew of similar reports from scholars amd government agencies about why enjoying your own music your own way on your own music player is either unAmerican, unhealthy, damaging to Our Way of Life, playing into the hands of terrorists, etc.
Because the music industry is horrified that the album, that high priced gold plated sacred cow of music commerce, is doomed. Artists make songs and the music labels make albums. End users listen to songs, but must buy albums to get them. The songs sell themselves, and users choke down the price of albums to get the songs.
The middle man, the record labels, touch all the money and most of it sticks to their fingers, but without the album there would be no middle man as such, and increasingly the online music stores are getting set up to cut the middle out. Since the music industry is mostly talentless marketing wonks who otherwise would have to market uncool things like vacuum cleaners, the extinction of the album as a concept would be a disaster and really cut down on the number of great parties and available women they have enjoyed up to now.
I would tend to agree with the outcome...but not with the idea that anyone is buttering bread with the USPTO. Those guys seem to be clueless as regards this topic, or at least they are following guidelines that themselves lack clue, but I don't know how they could be bought outright. Afterall they don't run for election; their jobs are more secure than anyone in Congress, probably. Say what you want to about pencil pushers in gov'mint, but they do follow their own rules like a bunch of mindless Turing machines.
I think that, once they get this one right (which might take years) they'll hew to the line like F/OSS zealots. Here's hoping, anyway.
There might be a genetic thing going on here. Check this out.
If you've been following recent thinking on evolution (SJ Gould et al.) then you will be familiar with the notion that evolution of a species does not necessarily take place in the middle of the herd where there is a lot of mixing of genes, but on the edges where small populations scratch out an existence. On the edges of a range, where habitat is by definition more diverse, less optimal and life a bit more harsh, there is adaptation of a sort to suit the situation. If those marginal populations remain separated from the mass of the population then adaptation proceeds apace, though it is constantly diluted by random reinjection of "mainstream" genetic material from the core. Still no evolution as such, but some diversity.
Now imagine that the (more or less) homogeneous population core getting fat on the best habitat suffers a collapse. Perhaps a new disease, a parasite, a new predator. Or the resources that had supported the majority of the species phenotype disappears. They are all the same, after all, so whatever hits very many of them hard can hit them all. Suddenly homogeneity is fatal, the population core drops out and the "edges" become all that is left...to become the new mainstream by default. You might actually end up with many new species generated over a few generations, due to all the fringe populations becoming now entirely disconnected both from the dampening effect of the core as well as from each other.
Now, about humans.
Though human evolution is complicated by our intelligence (in that we can somewhat avoid all that "natural selection" ickiness the other animals are faced with) it also holds that our intelligence may be the result of geeks. Yeah, I thought you'd like this part.
Intelligence is no big gift to life in the mainstream. The smart ones might have the best toys, but they're not "understood" and their motions appear random and unproductive to their peers. Imagine how someone must have looked inventing the first pushcart, or trying to domesticate a wolf...you get the picture; nutty professor. This is important because mating rituals in both humans and simple animals center on how well individuals can signify their superior properties as a mate. This is one of the factors that creates elaborate mating rituals in animals of all types. But there is no intelligence involved in mating rituals, and actually being independent-minded and a little eccentric will tend to mean that you may being doing the ritual creatively but you are not doing the ritual correctly, so you are not getting the best mate. Everyone reading this knows exactly what I am talking about.
If a geek does get a mate then the mate is probably geeky as well, in some fashion or another, and one might expect the pair of them are shuffled off to the edge of the village where they can do their geeky thing out of sight of the elders, while Ken and Barbie lead the ritual. (All except for the witches, who either became important members of the village subculture or were burned at the stake, depending on the period of history.)
However, not being the same as others has one (and probably only one) signal advantage; you were not invited to the very party where everyone drank the Koolaid. Maybe you are off beating your head against a tree in frustration, or wandering desolate in the wilderness, or you and your mate are enjoying a quiet if desperate life in a meadow just over the hill. Whatever. The village is wiped out by a plague, or a war, or during a famine, and Ken and Barbie and all their rituals with them. Leaving the desperate but independent geeks to carry on, both to their surprise and horror. Not a pretty picture, nobody wanted it that way, and Ken and Barbie where great people with perfect behaviors that were the model for the species. But the way it works is that the edges sometimes find themselves not just apart but suddenly desperately alone, indeed maybe all that is left of something they never were a part of, and
ROTFLMAO
nice one. Saint Adams knew the truth all along, didn't he?
The idea that US corporations will suffer due to lost American wages and buying power is not correct. They know perfectly well who will be buying their products next year, and it won't be out-of-work US workers. The new big market for everything -- toothbrushes, computers, network gear, tampons, hardwoods, everything -- is Asia. There are about 10 times as many Asians (all told) than there are US consumers and though historically they have been poor that is changing.
If the entire US consumer base fell flat tomorrow due to unemployment then there might be a problem for US companies. But it's not going to fall flat for another 5-10 years; the US consumer base will be propped up by tax breaks, war, low interest rates and promises for a while before reality sets in. By then the movement of American know-how, capacity and labor to Asia will have happened; wages and disposable income in Asia will rise, costs of products will drop to match, and Asians will be buying 10 times more products and services than American consumers could ever have dreamed. The global corporations would have turned the corner and in a single motion both created and then exploited the biggest consumer base in the history of our species.
Sorry, but we're doomed brothers and sisters. We're just not the right demographic. We didn't reproduce enough.
Before anyone sheds a tear for the lost American consumer, a similar thing happened in Europe and England toward the end of the industrial revolution, when America had become the biggest consumer of goods and services. Industry and business moved to the New World. The Old World fell on hard times, but eventually got it's collective act together and now many Europeans enjoy a quality of life that most Americans, shorn of their free time and tied to impossible productivity goals like sweatshop workers, can only yearn for.
For a while you burn bright, then you burn out. And eventually you get over burning all the time and you settle for living a normal life.
Let the Asians carry the torch a while if they care to. Frankly I can't recommend it, but hey they should have a chance. As for me and my wife and children, we're cutting living expenses, buying clothes at the thrift shop, moved to a cheaper rental, and enjoying simple pleasures like working in the garden and riding our bicycles. We're poor but we're together and we're happy. I took a teaching position at a small college and I'm not too worried about being outsourced again.
That's true. And when the middle managers are outsourced to Singapore then it will be just the upper managers in the US. But what do they really know? All their middle managers are now in Singapore. So the Board will fire the US upper managers and hire replacements in Singapore. But the CEO won't have day-to-day interactions with most of the company at that point. So the CEO will be placed on the Board and all the managment will be from Singapore. Only the Board and most of the stockholders will be in the US.
20 years later: All the major US IT companies are entirely managed from outsource companies, with only Board and stockholders in the US.
Then all the rich IT workers in Singapore will buy up the companies in hostile takeovers as aging American stockholders liquidate at a bargain, kick out the Board, install their fellows in leadership...and we will have finally exported wholesale a trillion+ dollar industry in record time. The Roman Empire took several hundred years to pull that off.
And this is...a good thing? Looks like giving away the farm. Well at least the Singaporians won't contribute to the Republican Party so then maybe we'll elect...oh wait, I suppose they will contribute illegally, or by proxy. Never mind. We really have given away the farm.
...does it come in 5 shagadelic colors?
Thank-yah-vury-much. I'll be playing here all week, folks.
Indeed, I've been ruined countless times, in just that manner. Shameless.
theCat
Yes, and it is my birthday as well. I was teased about it in school, probably part of the reason I don't think much of birthdays. Except my own kids, who were born on sensible days.
We tend to think of the M$ monopoly, and the subsequent homogenous pool of hosts, as being the reason for the rapid spread of worms. Actually, the monopoly means that most virus will be targeted for that platform because it is obvious, but a virus well targeted even for a niche platform like ISS can take off because there internet itself is now almost completely transparent.
What this suggests is that the combination of 1) bandwidth commonly available and 2) CPU speed are now more than sufficient for a virus to find almost all of the hosts it needs to anywhere these are on the internet. When a few early, fast hosts can spew 11,000,000 pps to random IP addresses then it doesn't take long to find what one is looking for.
No doubt this is part of the reason for the observation that when 2% of Windows sysadmins fail to patch for a known vuln, then the next worm to come along and exploit that vuln has a field day. 2% of a really big number is in turn a lot of hosts, millions of Windows hosts for example.
And a million of anything, be it Mac OSX or NetScreen or Checkpoint or BeOS or OS/2 or Amiga or anything, is fair game when a smartly written virus can get them all.
I guess I'll have to go back and review my Mac for system updates.
"Fair" is overused in this discussion as fairness does not enter into it. There is nothing fair or even equitable about most businesses even if their leaders are pious and temperate. Business models in their modern form are merely the domesticated versions of piracy, prostitution, murder-for-hire and fraud that has characterized 8,000 years history of the exchange of goods and services we call commerce in trade. The MBAs might disagree, but they've all read their Machiavelli primers too. As have I.
That said, business is not allowed to become government. It is only somewhat sarcastic to state that governments reserve for themselves the right to dictate what people can do, say or spend their money on. But businesses are *constantly* trying to elevate themselves into forms of government as that gives them just enough power to be almost as profitable as their shareholders expect. And this is where anti-trust law comes in. The government needs a tool to castrate any business that starts to dictate what people can do, say or spend their money on. And the shareholders can go to hell.
The EU, probably because it is a little new at this government thing, having recently been formed as it were, and being anyway something of a horse of another color as it were, is no doubt quite ready to show that it is bigger than a business, and has castration rights the same as any other government. The notion of setting an example of Microsoft, therefore, is more than slightly chilling; there is in theory no end to the benefit the EU could glean from a really nice, long, public castration of Microsoft.
It is as if Machiavelli was just elected Pope and, since he is not so pious as to be loved automatically, he must resort to a show of power to make sure he won't be undermined. So he fetches up in irons a lesser lord of a local domain who is known to abuse his power with the groundlings. Pope Machiavelli then declares him a heretic, confiscates his belongings, throws him in jail, threatens every day to kill him in painful ways, forces him to confess to all sorts of crimes real and imagined, to disown his birthright and his family, to sign over his wealth to the Pope, and then suddenly lets him out to wander the lands as a penniless begger spreading the word that the Pope is both powerful and merciful.
Microsoft is that lesser lord, it seems.
Enjoy the show.