We just added another reason (you needed another?) to keep your important code and data resources backed up and stored in a secure off-site facility.
The FBI/SS/Interpol can take anyone's machine anytime they want to and hold it forever, even just looking for emails that might be from someone you might know who might have committed a crime. You get email, right? And bits of interesting code? From a lot of people some of whom are developers, right? You know what all of them are up to all the time? Well you are in their email addressbook so maybe you should know.
The dark side social networking...
As things go, and as companies become even more litigious than they already are, I suspect that such loss of equipment and code to search and seizure might become as likely as catastrophic earthquake, fire or flood. Anyone in the code business better wisen up and assume that everything in your dev suite could be named in the next search warrant.
In all my experience teaching computer basics (mostly to teachers, actually) the one thing that blows them away is filing. My wife, with 15 years experience with desktop computers, still can't save files anywhere but on the desktop! It's not that it is hard...it's that it makes no sense compared to the real world, where "filing" something means putting it up on the frig with a magnet. Her desktop is like the frig, only there are 100 items sitting there sometimes.
I don't see a solution here, but I know that UI experts have always had issues with file systems in the OS. Probably a relational approach is better, something like M$ proposed database-based file system. Then hide all the details, including directory structure, from the end user (assuming that is what they are doing...) Use context searches to find things when you need them (works at least as well as my wife's digging through all the similarly named files on her desktop.)
Yeah I know, heresy. "Sounds like another Mac user." Whatever.
"The case offers two handles on its top offering portability; but due to its dimensions and weight, this chassis would not be an optimum choice for gamers or users who move their PCs frequently."
Most PC Gamers I know could stand some exercise. Besides, think how l33t one would look on LAN night lugging in their kit on a hand truck like a dock worker then setting it in the middle of the floor with a satisfying "thunk". You could put up safety cones around it and mount one of those rotating amber lights. Ph33r!
"Standards" contribute to the problem of monoculture in much the same way that standardizing on "front door with lock that opens with a key" contributes to home burglary. For that matter, all thieves speaking the same language in their home town makes it easier to discuss burglary. But the same standards also help us get around every day, so there is a tradeoff.
Now, interestingly enough, I suspect we are heading for an era of fewer such standards! Communication is already in flux due to encryption; my encrypted discussion with another person will appear as complete jibberish when intercepted, like when the Japanese intercepted US Navy transmissions that were actually clear-text conversations between North American Indians working in the radio room. As for locks...what happens when homes lose their locks in favor of AI, and simply recognize who can come in and who cannot? It is much harder to crack a system that is watching you while you attempt to crack it. After all, the house could simply kill you if it had the right weaponry. At the least, it would not be as gullible as a lock.
OK...my point approaches. Think for a moment about the shifting stairways and jumping rooms (well there was one at least in the last book) in the fabled Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Ignore for a moment all the spellcraft going on...just look at what you could do with the architecture...can you imagine trying to take that place with a SWAT team? What route would they storm through? What alternates would they plan? What if things started moving even faster during a suspected attack? Further, what if the students and staff knew the rules and could function well enough regardless? An assault would not even bear the attempt. Given a similar kind of approach to software (and it really is just an approach, not magick at all) the best defensive strategy in OSs would be to have them randomize themselves on-the-fly. Most binaries could afford a certain amount of NOP space inserted. During final compile a "deviantC++" compiler could randomly insert busy loops or security trips or even totally bogus code, like whole other apps laying around already (games come to mind) and have them jumped over by properly executing code. We have plenty of RAM on our systems and generally an excess of CPU cycles; let 50% or more of binary be lines of random or calculated diversion codes. And let the code move itself around!
We're so accustomed to the idea of optimizing code. We even reuse code and data objects and this is seen as a virtue and at present it is. But we could quickly decide that times have changed and it is no longer a virtue. My machine no longer has just 640K RAM, guys, and it has enough spare CPU to run Setiathome. I'm willing to sacrifice some of my slack for an OS and apps that gleefully rewrite themselves every few minutes. If that became very common then the notion of exploiting a computer remotely via known vuls would become a quaint memory of a primitive era in technology.
And now I will hustle my butt over to the USPTO to patent this scheme for the financial benefit of my heirs. Remember, you read it here first.
Things are really complicated in schools. To do technology right takes an enormous effort, and most schools, students and their parents don't have what it takes. I know, I've been there and left it behind. Given the collapse in the IT sector I expect many schools to just let their installations decay until there are no functional computers in the classroom. They are DEATHLY afraid of their charming students wrecking havok under the nose of the FBI and then having a bunch of politicos and gadfly parents descending on the school looking for someone to lynch (a favorite county Board of Education hobby). Teachers didn't used to have these worries...and are having increasing difficulty justifying the current situation.
So this incident might seem over-the-top, but it is probably just the tip of the ice berg. The techb binge is over, students will not be directed into technical areas because their will be not jobs waiting for them, and school IT is probably doomed as a result.
as near as I can tell, the IT sector CEOs are wanting to sell their products to developing countries. After all, that is where the growth is going forward. But as you might expect, those countries have their own internal economic realities and do NOT have Java programmers making $80K/yr (or truck drivers making $50k/yr) to buy those US goods. So what Intel, HP, etc want to do is manufacture at a cost this is *exactly* in line with the purchasing power of developing nations. They really do want to sell computers for $99 in Pakistan and they'll even take a small loss to do it, but they cannot make such a box using US labor or know-how at any phase of the process. So it is not exactly greed that motives them...it is growth potential in the third world.
My advice is this; get OUT of any part of the IT business that involves retail, including component design, software programming, product marketing, and support. All that is lost, and will never come back. Services and consulting remain good but limited, and there is always the Next Big Thing (tm) whatever that turns out to be.
Think of it this way. America innovates (we invented most of this technology, or developed it) then America profits richly for a few decades (yes we have) while the rest of the world tries to understand what the foosh we're so excited about (but they get over that quickly) then things become commoditized (as they must) and we lose monopoly control (which is probably a good thing). Then there is a certain suffering and retrospection, then we innovate again. Repeat as needed until the world is a better place to live. What is critical to our leadership role is that Americans NOT become either complacent, or discouraged, or bitter. This is our part, we've played our part well, and in generally the world thinks Americans are brilliant (if egotistical:) . So enjoy the knowledge that we've lifted the bell of the world and given it a hard smack, and it will ring for years to come. With luck and quick reactions most everyone in the dumps today will be riding high on yet another tsunami of innovation in a few years, with the rest of the world shaking their heads at those "crazy damned Americans". Don't forget that "H|P" used to be the initials of the names of a couple of guys working on a dream in their spare time in a garage (and yes I've even seen it). Maybe a few of us will be the Hewletts and Packards of the future.
...while playing a round of golf. Or hiking in a crater. Or retrieving a poorly aimed frisbee. Pausing, they'll see some badly eroded pile of something shiny, walk over to look at it closer, recall a paragraph from their early astrophysics lessons, and radio back to the colony base "Hey Rosco, wasn't it somewhere around here that Beagle2 was lost? Back in '03? Well it's not lost anymore."
Yes, I'm talking about humans on Mars, being casual and knocking about the place, kicking over rocks on a lazy day, sometime in my lifetime. It could be my son or daughter grown up. Or your own, or even yourself if you are young now. Keep that in mind today, it helps to take the edge off this sort of temporary setback.
Office desktop: RedHat 9 on AMD Home (me+wife+kids): Mac OS X Panther Something I use for one-off client software and site testing: Win2K on Dell P3
I have used a Mac since the SE30 (circa '88). The office is 100% Windoze, including assets in India (where they are about as Windoze addicted as one can be) and my office Linux desktop and laptops work out OK with the printing and shares with some fiddling. The server room is probably 75% Linux however, much of which I manage, and I went to Linux on the desktop a year ago with no regrets when my WinDell started locking up, except that I would have prefered a Mac.
I would use OS X at work if I could get the PHBs to spring for the hardware. But they don't really care about a lot that IMHO is important to enjoying work; I already bought my own Aeron task chair (to save my aching back) and my own LCD monitor (to save my aching eyes and immune system) and already built my own workstation (because I already have one flaky Dell) so maybe I should buy my own Mac for work.
Makes me feel like a damned visitor here sometimes! Screw it; I'll get a new iMac for home and bring my G4 to work. Some things you just cannot compromise on.
This is true. The limitations of email are setting an upper limit to how far the spammers can go with their obfuscation attempts. Going to HTML+images was supposed to solve that for them...except Evolution doesn't even display images in email unless you ask it to, and no doubt other mail clients will do likewise in their next version release. I think that detection of spam and protection of user eyeballs is no longer an issue....rather at issue is the shear volume of crap traversing the wires and landing, if not in our inboxes then certainly at our firewalls. As they say, you need to block unwanted traffic *before* it hits you, not after, otherwise it still costs you.
I just saw it yesterday with my kids (8 and 3) and we loved it, as you say grinning until my cheeks hurt. The youngest flinched a few times but he could *not* stop watching. The PG13 rating is OK in our book.
This is the first movie in decades where I cried. Not a blubbery sobbing, but there were real tears. My wife, and all the women around us, where sobbing with joy at the end. Fantastic.
It was also the first where I was driven to laugh and yell along with the rest of the crowd at the battles and heroics, the inside jokes, the sly glances. Stunning film, just stunning.
Won't win an award of course. None of the movies I really love ever win an award.
I recall another, perhaps it is the same one but morphed via the retelling, that around that same time some French doctor said that trains could never exceed 100 mph (kph?) or else the sheer speed would kill people riding the train.
Now in a way it makes sense. My wife and kids don't use the car, though I do, and when wife drives she is very slow (ie she gets pulled over by the police on that account). So when I toss them all in the car and we hit the highway at "daddy speed" they all freak out! No doubt they figure if I go any faster they'll die or something.
Speed is scary, until you live it. And even then you should probably be scared.
Yes, you are correct about the 1 year lockin. I didn't know about the $2.50 ding, but why am I not surprised? They would charge you for *not* using your phone if they at all could.
I'll predict now that as contracts near term most people are going to defect because *nobody* is happy with service and/or billing. AND they will prefer to jump to contracts that are not 1 year, like 6 months or 3 months, such that these contracts may eventually vanish at no additional cost to consumers who will simply get the lockin rate as a month-to-month contract.
I am married and my wife raises the kids and manages the home. She also does the bills. We try to do as much electronic commerce as we can, and pay our bills online. Since she knows very well what our expenses ought to be, and has access to detailed statements online and time to go over them, she finds things constantly. Mostly it is just random stuff where you say "wtf?" and make a phone call to get your bill adjusted. But we had a real dust-up with [cell phone service starting with S] over our family cell phone plan, where they were charging us hundreds of dollars extra on our phone bill for months on end. Every month we knew we would have to call them to get $100-$400 worth of charges removed, 8 hour calls to places we never even heard of, totally off the wall. Finally they "fixed" it and we have not been troubled for over a year. If we had not annoyed them so furiously for most of a year before, would our billing ever have straightened itself out? Not on your life! But what in the world actually *changed* in their system to shield us from bogosity I could not tell you!
I am dead certain that most (if not all) [cell phone service starting with S] customers are being overbilled on their mobile phone usage just as we were, and I suppose [cell phone service starting with S] spends a lot of time adjusting bills. There must be some really horrendous software blackhole in their billing system that gravitationally slings stray phone charges all over the database like so many loose asteriods.
Why we sucked up so many nasty stray bits remains a mystery. Were they testing us because we were new with a one year lockin? Rather more a mystery is how it stopped. I can tell you *why* it stopped, and it was because of my wife. So they have control of some kind, which they exercise at need.
What makes you reach for the tinfoil hat is the thought that maybe they don't "fix" the problem at the core because as a business matter it makes them money. Someone did the math and elected to a) invest less in expensive engineers doing process debugging, b) spend a little hiring low-paid phone jockies in Nevada to debate billing issues with irate customers, and 3) scrape off whatever is not adjusted as easy money.
It is the lure of easy money, and avoidance of hard work, that creates this nonsense. Now that we have transferable mobile numbers let's see how long it takes service providers to clean up their act. And, let's see if honest billing impacts the bottom line.
You didn't mention SCO in the list of "attacks"...but in a way you could have.
I think many are tuning in to the same channel as you are; there appears to be a lot of activity to drive down linux mindshare. It might be a coincidence and many assume that is the case...but it doesn't have to be the case does it?
And still Occam's razor demands the simplest explanation be assumed the correct one. So in this case we're seeing a chance alignment of events. SCO. Linux distributions attacked. Ballmer going on record saying that Windows has fewer (interesting) security failures. Et cetera. But Occam's razor does not require that we remain obtuse to patterns. Only that we wait and see what emerges.
So let's wait. If this is a serious FUD effort then someone on the inside is bound to let the cat out of the bag. And if it's not FUD...then maybe there are rough seas ahead.
Master/slave is just the latest. California is a minefield for this kind of crud, I should know I live in the Bay Area inside the Politically Correct triangle formed by Marin, Berkeley and Silicon Valley. I want to be as sensitive as the next bloke, but sometimes I pick up the paper and read something that just makes me want to puke. My wife is of the same mind and we rail against the PC fascists most mornings listening to public radio and browsing the newspaper.
PC fascism extends to pets, races, bums, unwed mothers and sexual deviants (not to lump anyone together...trying to be PC here as you can see...) who must be correctly refered to (respectively) as fur friends, people of color, the economically disadvantaged, single mothers and GLBTG (for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered crowd, though we used to call them all by the PC term "Gay" rather than homosexual but recently they each wanted in on the game so now we have this horrid acronym which I guess is itself more PC than PC. Barf).
Our everyday lexicon is scattered with taboo words and topics. Unless they are white the authorities cannot refer to a suspect criminal on the run by their race not even to facilitate apprehending them. And a vicious dog is never a dangerous animal that needs to be destroyed (as opposed to being a family member needing therapy) and you cannot discuss GLBTG "gay rights" issues in any manner other than as a political movement for justice even if that means they can demand the opportunity to explain their lifestyle choice at whatever level of detail suits them in front of a classroom of 13 year old children (to the horror of many who can do nothing to stop it...which is why increasingly we homeschool or private school and leave the public schools to the activists).
A middle class white person has to keep their head down. The best approach is to join a splinter group and start claiming your rights as a minority as loudly as you can. Some claim to be suppressed Native American. Others claim to belong to suppressed religions like Paganism (I happen to claim both, but that is because I happen to be both;) while others wave the flag of immigrant seeking fairness, or are non-English speakers, while others have been abused as children, or are incest survivors, or are food or chemical or medication sensitive (so don't wear perfume or cologne to the office, or bring a PBJ sandwich for your own lunch, or you'll kill them on the spot and just see if you don't) or had absent fathers, or absent grandparents, or didn't have cable TV when they were young, or are dyslexic, or corpulent, or are in some other way special and are a victim and not "part of the problem" created by the oppressive power elite (who BTW are increasingly Native Americans, immigrants, pagans, GLBTG, food/chemical/drug/fat/bilingual/disabled awareness lobbyists and for all I know family pets.)
Though it seems democratic and diverse, ours is a culture of identity politics and is rife with narrow interests. Nobody pulls together except within their narrowly defined identity group (though I can't imagine how the GLBTG manage it.) You cannot believe how much it sucks. It's a wonder there can be any progress at all on anything important, and it appears that more often than not there is no progresss at all. Where it is all headed I cannot imagine.
The vast majority of the networks that went dark were 24-bit in size. That is generally either small to medium businesses or home office, or a division of a larger business. I think we can all agree that outages at that level, though undesired, are not the end of the world. Small outfits and home office workers can afford the down time in the case of a general crisis (ie the buses aren't running, either, so go have a coffee and read the WSJ) and 4-8 hour outages on their DSL are not uncommon either. I know that is the case where I work, and we have a global presence too.
We invested in a very large portable battery backup system for our server room back when California was having its own blackouts. The stack would probably stay up an hour or so, which we figure is enough to manage most blackouts nicely, and anything longer than that is a "major cockup" that we need to wait out. But if we go down who will care? Just us, and not all that much.
I think that the general expectation regarding the internet is not that it will stay up 100% in a crisis, but that it will continue to operate in cells of functionality during most kinds of disaster, then recover quickly on its own as soon as it can built remote connections again. Compare that to the electric grid, where most or all cells of function were sucked empty and driven into the ground when the grid dried up, and engineers spent days coordinating their recovery so that the first cell to go online didn't feed the entire electric grid on its own. Tricky stuff.
TCP/IP is built to understand rolling outages and uncoordinated recovery. The electric grid still is not. That, I would submit, is the main issue and not that routers on the edge of small networks didn't have generator backup.
I know why it was stolen; it was an inside job to cover for what made the thing work. See all that shrouding on the device? Maybe a little of that would make sense to conceal corporate secrets (like they do with concept cars during road tests)...but that much could hide the presence of a small human. OK, tinfoil hat off now.
Which reminds me of the sideshow attraction in the 1700's called "The Turk" which was a chess playing manikin in a turban. Nobody could beat it and the world was vexed for a generation. Well the chess board sat atop a large chest containing a few visible gears and wires, behind which sat the automaton. Part of the chest was blocked off however and on examination was just large enough to conceal a somewhat cramped master chess player! This was never proven to be the way the device worked however, and eventually the device was lost in a fire (gee...that sounds familiar) but these days nobody doubts that there was a person in the chest.
OK, I'll bite. It's a serious question, but until it happens it is not a serious issue. I think it would be better to simply admit that the operating system of a computer is a common sandbox for actual applications, and so it might as well be a community effort because that is the best way to manage a "commons". Then give it away. This would lower the barrier to technology transfer to poorer nations and schools (a good thing) and focus corporate development on emerging technologies that run on top of the OS (also a good thing) while it would eliminate the chokehold any single company would have on the "commons" where all innovation either lives or dies (also a good thing). I mean, if Microsoft lost the OS war tomorrow, what would they do? Of course their coders would spend less time crafting shadowy APIs into the OS they control, and more time developing really excellent applications to run on the community OS that dominates.
Exploiting a commons to utter exhaustion is a well-understood human trait. We have never failed to do so as soon as the opportunity presents itself. This is because we have a well developed sense of personal gain, but a poorly developed sense of societal good, even to the point of our eventual individual destruction. If you are in a bright mood today and would like to read something to bring you down, try this lovely bit of rational thought: The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin (1968)
I'll save you a bit of surfing by extracting a tasty morsel, but do glance over the rest as it is quite a classic:
[snip]
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.
As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. Explicitly or implicitly, more or less consciously, he asks, "What is the utility to me of adding one more animal to my herd?" [snip technical stuff] [T]he rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another.... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit -- in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.
Some would say that this is a platitude. Would that it were! In a sense, it was learned thousands of years ago, but natural selection favors the forces of psychological denial. The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.
[endsnip]
The key insight here is that freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. So in other words, we kid ourselves into thinking that our tiny individual impact does not make a difference, that societal good is not impaired, thus we have the freedom to pursue our impulses to better our share, and working individually this way we ruin everything that does not have a high barrier to entry. The way this applies to email/weblogs/Usenet/etc is that in the beginning the technical hurdles are too high for there to be very many users with thier little impacts, so the Commons is safe for a while. But then comes the GUI and push-button bots and the Commons is swamped. The normal "natural" balance is broken apart and the Commons collapses from the death of a thousand cuts. It has ever been thus, and unless I am mistaken it always will be unless you defend your Commons from newcomers. Which has been tried.
At 44, I know what you are feeling. It does seem strange, and I wonder what I am teaching my young children; anytime there is a question in family discussions, about anything, we all jump on the computer, hit Google, and wade through the listing. It works every time.
Thank heavens they love books or else I would really be nervous. Actually, we find book reading to be more enjoyable because of the additional background and information that can be found on the Internet. Obscure religious issues, people, battles, laws, or the histories of countries mentioned in books are easily investigated.
I see no problem with it. I see more problem with computer games, but that's another topic.
The question about what would happen to Physics if it had been proprietary is well known because it happened. For centuries the study of nature in the Western world was controlled by the Christian church. Chemists of the day were burned at the stake, Galileo was persecuted, and the earth was the center of the universe. And where did it all get us? Absolutely nowhere, not even to solidify the political power of the Church. When the disadvantages of Church dogma started dragging things down the church lost its grip on such study, and only then did serious work in hard science really take off. Yet if you needed any indication of how keenly felt was the loss, the church even now meddles in the teaching of these subjects to new generations.
Now technolgy is in the hands of the Church of the Closed Source? For a while, maybe. But the particular Imp Perverse that is technology won't stay bottled up for long. And like the Vatican, the proprietary technology vendors will look just as backward and ill-serving even of their own interests when the historians set about recording what happened.
It seems to be happening that matters which begin as purely technical/scientific become marketing and sales issues. Witness what happened to the Darpanet when it went public and became the Internet we know today. At the time I was studying CS in college and I recall academics and government types where wringing their hands over the inevitable "dumbing down" of the technology in favor commercial applications and services to the public. Read that as marketing and sales. And we can see where that got us; mom and pop on broadband but with "personal" technology never meant to leave the secure isolation of the living room.
Although viruses got their start on the floppy disk vector (recall boot sector viri?) they have come into their own throught the vector of the Internet. That machine could not have been better built to propogate malware even if one had set out to do so, but the only reason it can actualy do so to the degree it has is because of the brain dead operating systems (and rookie sysadmins) at the remote ends of the pipes. And the monoculture of both is at the heart of the problem. I use MacOSX on broadband, but do you seriously think I have to worry about any of this? No I do not.
Enter security. Now an entire industry has emerged to counterpoint the monoculture, an industry devoted to what would simply have been the day-to-day work of any competent sysadmin just 10 years ago, except that today there are few competent sysadmins. Rather there are hordes of desktop drones massaging M$-based networks across the planet, only incidently linked each to the other by an Internet of which they have no particular understanding nor much interest (a direct reflection of M$'s own utter indifference.) It has all become a dense, dry, sprawling monotypic tinder of light twigs and leaves awaiting the match. The security industry is built around that monoculture of neglect and ignorance, would have no purpose without it, and yet is directed at undoing what the monoculture has done to, and via, the Internet. And since M$ is just a marketing and sales juggernaut with its roots deep in the fertile manure of personal computing, should anyone be surprized that here again the network technology and science are falling under the tracks of the M$ Panzer divisions? I should hope not. M$ did not become a monopoly by being easily distracted with technical details.
I can see no solution but one. Government will not act because politicos are hip to marketing. Regulators will not act because they are afraid of the politicos and like their cushy jobs. And people will continue to select technology out of innocent ignorance. M$ spends freely, buys strategic friends, revises history, and builds outward seemingly oblivious to the coming train wreck because they know for a fact they will just walk away with profits intact; they are afterall about personal computers, and not much more. What is the Internet to M$ except a problem? They distribute their software on CDs and only security patches over the Internet to defend their CD-based software from Internet attack. I should think they would be twice-pleased if the Internet and everything associated with it, including OSS, simply vanished in a general conflagration.
The one solution? I propose we take a clue from Nature and let it burn. We don't need these weeds growing here anymore, burn them out and their seeds as well. The network will survive because the network is not the problem, while the strictly "personal" computers will burn to the ground at the ends of the pipes. Then perhaps something more robust will spring up where they were. It might even be that M$ has the very thing waiting in the wings, ready to roll out, "Windows ProSecure" or some silliness. Fine with me. But if they don't then they are fools and their undoing will be of their own devising.
that the list of 50 million do-not-call numbers be released to the DMA for "market research purposes". In other news, the Federal court in Oklahoma has suspend its judicial calendar to take a fact finding mission to Las Vegas where the judges will enjoy an all-expense paid bacchanal courtesy of the DMA.
Slashdot Mirror
We just added another reason (you needed another?) to keep your important code and data resources backed up and stored in a secure off-site facility.
The FBI/SS/Interpol can take anyone's machine anytime they want to and hold it forever, even just looking for emails that might be from someone you might know who might have committed a crime. You get email, right? And bits of interesting code? From a lot of people some of whom are developers, right? You know what all of them are up to all the time? Well you are in their email addressbook so maybe you should know.
The dark side social networking...
As things go, and as companies become even more litigious than they already are, I suspect that such loss of equipment and code to search and seizure might become as likely as catastrophic earthquake, fire or flood. Anyone in the code business better wisen up and assume that everything in your dev suite could be named in the next search warrant.
In all my experience teaching computer basics (mostly to teachers, actually) the one thing that blows them away is filing. My wife, with 15 years experience with desktop computers, still can't save files anywhere but on the desktop! It's not that it is hard...it's that it makes no sense compared to the real world, where "filing" something means putting it up on the frig with a magnet. Her desktop is like the frig, only there are 100 items sitting there sometimes.
I don't see a solution here, but I know that UI experts have always had issues with file systems in the OS. Probably a relational approach is better, something like M$ proposed database-based file system. Then hide all the details, including directory structure, from the end user (assuming that is what they are doing...) Use context searches to find things when you need them (works at least as well as my wife's digging through all the similarly named files on her desktop.)
Yeah I know, heresy. "Sounds like another Mac user." Whatever.
upper body workout:
"The case offers two handles on its top offering portability; but due to its dimensions and weight, this chassis would not be an optimum choice for gamers or users who move their PCs frequently."
Most PC Gamers I know could stand some exercise. Besides, think how l33t one would look on LAN night lugging in their kit on a hand truck like a dock worker then setting it in the middle of the floor with a satisfying "thunk". You could put up safety cones around it and mount one of those rotating amber lights. Ph33r!
"Standards" contribute to the problem of monoculture in much the same way that standardizing on "front door with lock that opens with a key" contributes to home burglary. For that matter, all thieves speaking the same language in their home town makes it easier to discuss burglary. But the same standards also help us get around every day, so there is a tradeoff.
Now, interestingly enough, I suspect we are heading for an era of fewer such standards! Communication is already in flux due to encryption; my encrypted discussion with another person will appear as complete jibberish when intercepted, like when the Japanese intercepted US Navy transmissions that were actually clear-text conversations between North American Indians working in the radio room. As for locks...what happens when homes lose their locks in favor of AI, and simply recognize who can come in and who cannot? It is much harder to crack a system that is watching you while you attempt to crack it. After all, the house could simply kill you if it had the right weaponry. At the least, it would not be as gullible as a lock.
OK...my point approaches. Think for a moment about the shifting stairways and jumping rooms (well there was one at least in the last book) in the fabled Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Ignore for a moment all the spellcraft going on...just look at what you could do with the architecture...can you imagine trying to take that place with a SWAT team? What route would they storm through? What alternates would they plan? What if things started moving even faster during a suspected attack? Further, what if the students and staff knew the rules and could function well enough regardless? An assault would not even bear the attempt. Given a similar kind of approach to software (and it really is just an approach, not magick at all) the best defensive strategy in OSs would be to have them randomize themselves on-the-fly. Most binaries could afford a certain amount of NOP space inserted. During final compile a "deviantC++" compiler could randomly insert busy loops or security trips or even totally bogus code, like whole other apps laying around already (games come to mind) and have them jumped over by properly executing code. We have plenty of RAM on our systems and generally an excess of CPU cycles; let 50% or more of binary be lines of random or calculated diversion codes. And let the code move itself around!
We're so accustomed to the idea of optimizing code. We even reuse code and data objects and this is seen as a virtue and at present it is. But we could quickly decide that times have changed and it is no longer a virtue. My machine no longer has just 640K RAM, guys, and it has enough spare CPU to run Setiathome. I'm willing to sacrifice some of my slack for an OS and apps that gleefully rewrite themselves every few minutes. If that became very common then the notion of exploiting a computer remotely via known vuls would become a quaint memory of a primitive era in technology.
And now I will hustle my butt over to the USPTO to patent this scheme for the financial benefit of my heirs. Remember, you read it here first.
Things are really complicated in schools. To do technology right takes an enormous effort, and most schools, students and their parents don't have what it takes. I know, I've been there and left it behind. Given the collapse in the IT sector I expect many schools to just let their installations decay until there are no functional computers in the classroom. They are DEATHLY afraid of their charming students wrecking havok under the nose of the FBI and then having a bunch of politicos and gadfly parents descending on the school looking for someone to lynch (a favorite county Board of Education hobby). Teachers didn't used to have these worries...and are having increasing difficulty justifying the current situation.
So this incident might seem over-the-top, but it is probably just the tip of the ice berg. The techb binge is over, students will not be directed into technical areas because their will be not jobs waiting for them, and school IT is probably doomed as a result.
as near as I can tell, the IT sector CEOs are wanting to sell their products to developing countries. After all, that is where the growth is going forward. But as you might expect, those countries have their own internal economic realities and do NOT have Java programmers making $80K/yr (or truck drivers making $50k/yr) to buy those US goods. So what Intel, HP, etc want to do is manufacture at a cost this is *exactly* in line with the purchasing power of developing nations. They really do want to sell computers for $99 in Pakistan and they'll even take a small loss to do it, but they cannot make such a box using US labor or know-how at any phase of the process. So it is not exactly greed that motives them...it is growth potential in the third world.
:) . So enjoy the knowledge that we've lifted the bell of the world and given it a hard smack, and it will ring for years to come. With luck and quick reactions most everyone in the dumps today will be riding high on yet another tsunami of innovation in a few years, with the rest of the world shaking their heads at those "crazy damned Americans". Don't forget that "H|P" used to be the initials of the names of a couple of guys working on a dream in their spare time in a garage (and yes I've even seen it). Maybe a few of us will be the Hewletts and Packards of the future.
My advice is this; get OUT of any part of the IT business that involves retail, including component design, software programming, product marketing, and support. All that is lost, and will never come back. Services and consulting remain good but limited, and there is always the Next Big Thing (tm) whatever that turns out to be.
Think of it this way. America innovates (we invented most of this technology, or developed it) then America profits richly for a few decades (yes we have) while the rest of the world tries to understand what the foosh we're so excited about (but they get over that quickly) then things become commoditized (as they must) and we lose monopoly control (which is probably a good thing). Then there is a certain suffering and retrospection, then we innovate again. Repeat as needed until the world is a better place to live. What is critical to our leadership role is that Americans NOT become either complacent, or discouraged, or bitter. This is our part, we've played our part well, and in generally the world thinks Americans are brilliant (if egotistical
As the East Indians always say; "do the needful."
...while playing a round of golf. Or hiking in a crater. Or retrieving a poorly aimed frisbee. Pausing, they'll see some badly eroded pile of something shiny, walk over to look at it closer, recall a paragraph from their early astrophysics lessons, and radio back to the colony base "Hey Rosco, wasn't it somewhere around here that Beagle2 was lost? Back in '03? Well it's not lost anymore."
Yes, I'm talking about humans on Mars, being casual and knocking about the place, kicking over rocks on a lazy day, sometime in my lifetime. It could be my son or daughter grown up. Or your own, or even yourself if you are young now. Keep that in mind today, it helps to take the edge off this sort of temporary setback.
Office desktop: RedHat 9 on AMD
Home (me+wife+kids): Mac OS X Panther
Something I use for one-off client software and site testing: Win2K on Dell P3
I have used a Mac since the SE30 (circa '88). The office is 100% Windoze, including assets in India (where they are about as Windoze addicted as one can be) and my office Linux desktop and laptops work out OK with the printing and shares with some fiddling. The server room is probably 75% Linux however, much of which I manage, and I went to Linux on the desktop a year ago with no regrets when my WinDell started locking up, except that I would have prefered a Mac.
I would use OS X at work if I could get the PHBs to spring for the hardware. But they don't really care about a lot that IMHO is important to enjoying work; I already bought my own Aeron task chair (to save my aching back) and my own LCD monitor (to save my aching eyes and immune system) and already built my own workstation (because I already have one flaky Dell) so maybe I should buy my own Mac for work.
Makes me feel like a damned visitor here sometimes! Screw it; I'll get a new iMac for home and bring my G4 to work. Some things you just cannot compromise on.
This is true. The limitations of email are setting an upper limit to how far the spammers can go with their obfuscation attempts. Going to HTML+images was supposed to solve that for them...except Evolution doesn't even display images in email unless you ask it to, and no doubt other mail clients will do likewise in their next version release. I think that detection of spam and protection of user eyeballs is no longer an issue....rather at issue is the shear volume of crap traversing the wires and landing, if not in our inboxes then certainly at our firewalls. As they say, you need to block unwanted traffic *before* it hits you, not after, otherwise it still costs you.
I just saw it yesterday with my kids (8 and 3) and we loved it, as you say grinning until my cheeks hurt. The youngest flinched a few times but he could *not* stop watching. The PG13 rating is OK in our book.
This is the first movie in decades where I cried. Not a blubbery sobbing, but there were real tears. My wife, and all the women around us, where sobbing with joy at the end. Fantastic.
It was also the first where I was driven to laugh and yell along with the rest of the crowd at the battles and heroics, the inside jokes, the sly glances. Stunning film, just stunning.
Won't win an award of course. None of the movies I really love ever win an award.
I recall another, perhaps it is the same one but morphed via the retelling, that around that same time some French doctor said that trains could never exceed 100 mph (kph?) or else the sheer speed would kill people riding the train.
Now in a way it makes sense. My wife and kids don't use the car, though I do, and when wife drives she is very slow (ie she gets pulled over by the police on that account). So when I toss them all in the car and we hit the highway at "daddy speed" they all freak out! No doubt they figure if I go any faster they'll die or something.
Speed is scary, until you live it. And even then you should probably be scared.
Yes, you are correct about the 1 year lockin. I didn't know about the $2.50 ding, but why am I not surprised? They would charge you for *not* using your phone if they at all could.
I'll predict now that as contracts near term most people are going to defect because *nobody* is happy with service and/or billing. AND they will prefer to jump to contracts that are not 1 year, like 6 months or 3 months, such that these contracts may eventually vanish at no additional cost to consumers who will simply get the lockin rate as a month-to-month contract.
We can only hope.
I am married and my wife raises the kids and manages the home. She also does the bills. We try to do as much electronic commerce as we can, and pay our bills online. Since she knows very well what our expenses ought to be, and has access to detailed statements online and time to go over them, she finds things constantly. Mostly it is just random stuff where you say "wtf?" and make a phone call to get your bill adjusted. But we had a real dust-up with [cell phone service starting with S] over our family cell phone plan, where they were charging us hundreds of dollars extra on our phone bill for months on end. Every month we knew we would have to call them to get $100-$400 worth of charges removed, 8 hour calls to places we never even heard of, totally off the wall. Finally they "fixed" it and we have not been troubled for over a year. If we had not annoyed them so furiously for most of a year before, would our billing ever have straightened itself out? Not on your life! But what in the world actually *changed* in their system to shield us from bogosity I could not tell you!
I am dead certain that most (if not all) [cell phone service starting with S] customers are being overbilled on their mobile phone usage just as we were, and I suppose [cell phone service starting with S] spends a lot of time adjusting bills. There must be some really horrendous software blackhole in their billing system that gravitationally slings stray phone charges all over the database like so many loose asteriods.
Why we sucked up so many nasty stray bits remains a mystery. Were they testing us because we were new with a one year lockin? Rather more a mystery is how it stopped. I can tell you *why* it stopped, and it was because of my wife. So they have control of some kind, which they exercise at need.
What makes you reach for the tinfoil hat is the thought that maybe they don't "fix" the problem at the core because as a business matter it makes them money. Someone did the math and elected to a) invest less in expensive engineers doing process debugging, b) spend a little hiring low-paid phone jockies in Nevada to debate billing issues with irate customers, and 3) scrape off whatever is not adjusted as easy money.
It is the lure of easy money, and avoidance of hard work, that creates this nonsense. Now that we have transferable mobile numbers let's see how long it takes service providers to clean up their act. And, let's see if honest billing impacts the bottom line.
You didn't mention SCO in the list of "attacks"...but in a way you could have.
I think many are tuning in to the same channel as you are; there appears to be a lot of activity to drive down linux mindshare. It might be a coincidence and many assume that is the case...but it doesn't have to be the case does it?
And still Occam's razor demands the simplest explanation be assumed the correct one. So in this case we're seeing a chance alignment of events. SCO. Linux distributions attacked. Ballmer going on record saying that Windows has fewer (interesting) security failures. Et cetera. But Occam's razor does not require that we remain obtuse to patterns. Only that we wait and see what emerges.
So let's wait. If this is a serious FUD effort then someone on the inside is bound to let the cat out of the bag. And if it's not FUD...then maybe there are rough seas ahead.
Master/slave is just the latest. California is a minefield for this kind of crud, I should know I live in the Bay Area inside the Politically Correct triangle formed by Marin, Berkeley and Silicon Valley. I want to be as sensitive as the next bloke, but sometimes I pick up the paper and read something that just makes me want to puke. My wife is of the same mind and we rail against the PC fascists most mornings listening to public radio and browsing the newspaper.
;) while others wave the flag of immigrant seeking fairness, or are non-English speakers, while others have been abused as children, or are incest survivors, or are food or chemical or medication sensitive (so don't wear perfume or cologne to the office, or bring a PBJ sandwich for your own lunch, or you'll kill them on the spot and just see if you don't) or had absent fathers, or absent grandparents, or didn't have cable TV when they were young, or are dyslexic, or corpulent, or are in some other way special and are a victim and not "part of the problem" created by the oppressive power elite (who BTW are increasingly Native Americans, immigrants, pagans, GLBTG, food/chemical/drug/fat/bilingual/disabled awareness lobbyists and for all I know family pets.)
PC fascism extends to pets, races, bums, unwed mothers and sexual deviants (not to lump anyone together...trying to be PC here as you can see...) who must be correctly refered to (respectively) as fur friends, people of color, the economically disadvantaged, single mothers and GLBTG (for the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered crowd, though we used to call them all by the PC term "Gay" rather than homosexual but recently they each wanted in on the game so now we have this horrid acronym which I guess is itself more PC than PC. Barf).
Our everyday lexicon is scattered with taboo words and topics. Unless they are white the authorities cannot refer to a suspect criminal on the run by their race not even to facilitate apprehending them. And a vicious dog is never a dangerous animal that needs to be destroyed (as opposed to being a family member needing therapy) and you cannot discuss GLBTG "gay rights" issues in any manner other than as a political movement for justice even if that means they can demand the opportunity to explain their lifestyle choice at whatever level of detail suits them in front of a classroom of 13 year old children (to the horror of many who can do nothing to stop it...which is why increasingly we homeschool or private school and leave the public schools to the activists).
A middle class white person has to keep their head down. The best approach is to join a splinter group and start claiming your rights as a minority as loudly as you can. Some claim to be suppressed Native American. Others claim to belong to suppressed religions like Paganism (I happen to claim both, but that is because I happen to be both
Though it seems democratic and diverse, ours is a culture of identity politics and is rife with narrow interests. Nobody pulls together except within their narrowly defined identity group (though I can't imagine how the GLBTG manage it.) You cannot believe how much it sucks. It's a wonder there can be any progress at all on anything important, and it appears that more often than not there is no progresss at all. Where it is all headed I cannot imagine.
The vast majority of the networks that went dark were 24-bit in size. That is generally either small to medium businesses or home office, or a division of a larger business. I think we can all agree that outages at that level, though undesired, are not the end of the world. Small outfits and home office workers can afford the down time in the case of a general crisis (ie the buses aren't running, either, so go have a coffee and read the WSJ) and 4-8 hour outages on their DSL are not uncommon either. I know that is the case where I work, and we have a global presence too.
We invested in a very large portable battery backup system for our server room back when California was having its own blackouts. The stack would probably stay up an hour or so, which we figure is enough to manage most blackouts nicely, and anything longer than that is a "major cockup" that we need to wait out. But if we go down who will care? Just us, and not all that much.
I think that the general expectation regarding the internet is not that it will stay up 100% in a crisis, but that it will continue to operate in cells of functionality during most kinds of disaster, then recover quickly on its own as soon as it can built remote connections again. Compare that to the electric grid, where most or all cells of function were sucked empty and driven into the ground when the grid dried up, and engineers spent days coordinating their recovery so that the first cell to go online didn't feed the entire electric grid on its own. Tricky stuff.
TCP/IP is built to understand rolling outages and uncoordinated recovery. The electric grid still is not. That, I would submit, is the main issue and not that routers on the edge of small networks didn't have generator backup.
I know why it was stolen; it was an inside job to cover for what made the thing work. See all that shrouding on the device? Maybe a little of that would make sense to conceal corporate secrets (like they do with concept cars during road tests)...but that much could hide the presence of a small human. OK, tinfoil hat off now.
Which reminds me of the sideshow attraction in the 1700's called "The Turk" which was a chess playing manikin in a turban. Nobody could beat it and the world was vexed for a generation. Well the chess board sat atop a large chest containing a few visible gears and wires, behind which sat the automaton. Part of the chest was blocked off however and on examination was just large enough to conceal a somewhat cramped master chess player! This was never proven to be the way the device worked however, and eventually the device was lost in a fire (gee...that sounds familiar) but these days nobody doubts that there was a person in the chest.
OK, I'll bite. It's a serious question, but until it happens it is not a serious issue. I think it would be better to simply admit that the operating system of a computer is a common sandbox for actual applications, and so it might as well be a community effort because that is the best way to manage a "commons". Then give it away. This would lower the barrier to technology transfer to poorer nations and schools (a good thing) and focus corporate development on emerging technologies that run on top of the OS (also a good thing) while it would eliminate the chokehold any single company would have on the "commons" where all innovation either lives or dies (also a good thing). I mean, if Microsoft lost the OS war tomorrow, what would they do? Of course their coders would spend less time crafting shadowy APIs into the OS they control, and more time developing really excellent applications to run on the community OS that dominates.
I'll save you a bit of surfing by extracting a tasty morsel, but do glance over the rest as it is quite a classic:
[snip] [endsnip]
The key insight here is that freedom in a commons brings ruin to all. So in other words, we kid ourselves into thinking that our tiny individual impact does not make a difference, that societal good is not impaired, thus we have the freedom to pursue our impulses to better our share, and working individually this way we ruin everything that does not have a high barrier to entry. The way this applies to email/weblogs/Usenet/etc is that in the beginning the technical hurdles are too high for there to be very many users with thier little impacts, so the Commons is safe for a while. But then comes the GUI and push-button bots and the Commons is swamped. The normal "natural" balance is broken apart and the Commons collapses from the death of a thousand cuts. It has ever been thus, and unless I am mistaken it always will be unless you defend your Commons from newcomers. Which has been tried.
At 44, I know what you are feeling. It does seem strange, and I wonder what I am teaching my young children; anytime there is a question in family discussions, about anything, we all jump on the computer, hit Google, and wade through the listing. It works every time.
Thank heavens they love books or else I would really be nervous. Actually, we find book reading to be more enjoyable because of the additional background and information that can be found on the Internet. Obscure religious issues, people, battles, laws, or the histories of countries mentioned in books are easily investigated.
I see no problem with it. I see more problem with computer games, but that's another topic.
The question about what would happen to Physics if it had been proprietary is well known because it happened. For centuries the study of nature in the Western world was controlled by the Christian church. Chemists of the day were burned at the stake, Galileo was persecuted, and the earth was the center of the universe. And where did it all get us? Absolutely nowhere, not even to solidify the political power of the Church. When the disadvantages of Church dogma started dragging things down the church lost its grip on such study, and only then did serious work in hard science really take off. Yet if you needed any indication of how keenly felt was the loss, the church even now meddles in the teaching of these subjects to new generations.
Now technolgy is in the hands of the Church of the Closed Source? For a while, maybe. But the particular Imp Perverse that is technology won't stay bottled up for long. And like the Vatican, the proprietary technology vendors will look just as backward and ill-serving even of their own interests when the historians set about recording what happened.
It seems to be happening that matters which begin as purely technical/scientific become marketing and sales issues. Witness what happened to the Darpanet when it went public and became the Internet we know today. At the time I was studying CS in college and I recall academics and government types where wringing their hands over the inevitable "dumbing down" of the technology in favor commercial applications and services to the public. Read that as marketing and sales. And we can see where that got us; mom and pop on broadband but with "personal" technology never meant to leave the secure isolation of the living room.
Although viruses got their start on the floppy disk vector (recall boot sector viri?) they have come into their own throught the vector of the Internet. That machine could not have been better built to propogate malware even if one had set out to do so, but the only reason it can actualy do so to the degree it has is because of the brain dead operating systems (and rookie sysadmins) at the remote ends of the pipes. And the monoculture of both is at the heart of the problem. I use MacOSX on broadband, but do you seriously think I have to worry about any of this? No I do not.
Enter security. Now an entire industry has emerged to counterpoint the monoculture, an industry devoted to what would simply have been the day-to-day work of any competent sysadmin just 10 years ago, except that today there are few competent sysadmins. Rather there are hordes of desktop drones massaging M$-based networks across the planet, only incidently linked each to the other by an Internet of which they have no particular understanding nor much interest (a direct reflection of M$'s own utter indifference.) It has all become a dense, dry, sprawling monotypic tinder of light twigs and leaves awaiting the match. The security industry is built around that monoculture of neglect and ignorance, would have no purpose without it, and yet is directed at undoing what the monoculture has done to, and via, the Internet. And since M$ is just a marketing and sales juggernaut with its roots deep in the fertile manure of personal computing, should anyone be surprized that here again the network technology and science are falling under the tracks of the M$ Panzer divisions? I should hope not. M$ did not become a monopoly by being easily distracted with technical details.
I can see no solution but one. Government will not act because politicos are hip to marketing. Regulators will not act because they are afraid of the politicos and like their cushy jobs. And people will continue to select technology out of innocent ignorance. M$ spends freely, buys strategic friends, revises history, and builds outward seemingly oblivious to the coming train wreck because they know for a fact they will just walk away with profits intact; they are afterall about personal computers, and not much more. What is the Internet to M$ except a problem? They distribute their software on CDs and only security patches over the Internet to defend their CD-based software from Internet attack. I should think they would be twice-pleased if the Internet and everything associated with it, including OSS, simply vanished in a general conflagration.
The one solution? I propose we take a clue from Nature and let it burn. We don't need these weeds growing here anymore, burn them out and their seeds as well. The network will survive because the network is not the problem, while the strictly "personal" computers will burn to the ground at the ends of the pipes. Then perhaps something more robust will spring up where they were. It might even be that M$ has the very thing waiting in the wings, ready to roll out, "Windows ProSecure" or some silliness. Fine with me. But if they don't then they are fools and their undoing will be of their own devising.
that the list of 50 million do-not-call numbers be released to the DMA for "market research purposes". In other news, the Federal court in Oklahoma has suspend its judicial calendar to take a fact finding mission to Las Vegas where the judges will enjoy an all-expense paid bacchanal courtesy of the DMA.
This sounds like something out of a Japanese graphic novel.
"frist psot", "pron" and "fsck" work so well, although I suppose the latter is something of a departure from "scramble them up".