It's more than cost-per-MB; in terms of that, floppies are actually quite hideously expensive and have been for some time. (The last time I bothered to compare was in 2004, but at that point floppies were $130 per GB, while DVD-Rs were around $0.20, you can see a chart here.) The niche that floppies filled, though, wasn't just "cheap storage," but individually cheap (to the point where the value of each disk was basically negligible) disks, and ubiquitously available drives, that were fast and easy to use (no burning to CD), reusable, and physically robust.
I agree with the GGP (parent to my original post) that there really isn't a direct replacement for floppies; instead, their duties have been split among a variety of new technologies. People who still need to move files between computers that aren't networked, can use USB keychain drives. Most people, who are on networked computers, just use email or other network services. Big files or large presentations can be put on CD or DVD; same with backups.
Floppies were unique in their time, because they did basically all of these duties (although, arguably none of them as well as what has replaced them in each case). I doubt that we'll see another technology do as many things as it did; the future is in more specialized tools.
To be honest I've never tried. I use it mostly with my newer Macs, which won't boot from floppies (IIRC: System 8 and later were too big to fit on a 1.44MB disk, even in their most minimal configurations, and most Macs without internal FDs won't boot under System 7, which was the last one that you could slim down far enough). I think that the elimination of the ability to boot into System 7, and thus use floppies as a recovery mechanism, was one of the things that actually allowed Apple to get rid of the floppy drive so early. Everything was already designed around booting from CDs. (That, and Macs don't have an upgradeable BIOS.)
I assume on a PC, that you'd be at the mercy of the BIOS, and whether it had a boot-from-USB option. (I'd hope that if the manufacturer omitted an actual FD controller that they would offer this as an option; it's a bit of a Catch-22 if they don't...)
I'm not a datacenter operator, but don't most rackmount servers have RS232 ports? I would think those would be more useful than a PS/2 keyboard, as long as the BIOS supports it (and I'd hope any self-respecting server would). I'd rather deal with serial lines and a serial switchbox than full-on KVM, with VGA and PS/2, for a whole rack's worth of 1Us.
It drives me nuts that they've gotten rid of serial ports on some low-end consumer boxes; I would hope that they're not taking it off of server mobos, particularly ones that are designed for headless operation, since it ought to be the natural choice for a "local console." Heck, get rid of the graphics chips and VGA before you get rid of RS232!
I think you have a good point -- there really isn't anything that's the exact match for a floppy, in terms of cheap, ubiquitous storage -- but I think the demand for it has decreased to the point where people will only miss it occasionally.
I used to keep stacks of floppies sitting around, mostly ones conveniently sent to my home by the kind folks at America Online, to give to people when they needed some document or other. I rarely got them back, and it was understood that discs just sort of circulated around, like some sort of valueless currency. When you needed one, you just looked around until you found one (that looked disused) and did whatever you had to do.
Email has really replaced floppies. Not just email as a service, because obviously email has been around for decades, and floppies didn't decline in popularity until the last few years, but near-universal access to email, with the capability of receiving nontrivial attachments (greater than a few K but less than a few MB), and always-on connectivity. Before you had that, giving someone a floppy with a document was the most convenient method. Now, email is by far easier. If I was working on something, and needed to give someone a copy, using removable storage wouldn't be my first thought: instead I'd just send it to them.
The kind of removable storage you're talking about is only necessary for a few cases, either where the file is too big to be practically attached to an email, or the person doesn't have an email address (rare, these days) or other internet access to receive it. So in those cases, CD-R or CD-RW are made to suffice.
Overall, mini CDs or business-card CD-Rs would be a good candidate for replacement (and it's really not hard to put them in a little vinyl sleeve to keep them from getting scratched; 5.25" floppies didn't last long outside a paper sleeve either), but the market for them is just so limited that the economies of scale don't exist to make them as cheap as floppies were.
Alas, I have no dvd burner, so I'm still stuck with CDs.
Good god... how do you stand it? And what do you carry your backup sets around in, a wheelbarrow?:)
Do your back a favor; you can get a DVD+R for less than $30 these days. (I have heard that DVD+R is better for long-term storage than -R, although it's a moot point these days because even the cheapest drives burn both.) Which is painful, because not that long ago I paid almost $500 for one, but I guess that's technology.
Not that backing up a modern hard drive to DVDs is even particularly fun; it's getting to the point where the best backup media for a hard drive is... another hard drive. I don't know what the magnetic tape people have been doing while the hard drive engineers have been working, but they really haven't kept up very well.
Not to mention multiple computers hiding behind NAT; they would probably appear to be one system, due to the single IP address, unless the software for determining "hits" is smart enough to look at the transactions and realize that the same IP address just requested the same data 4 times over, and thus is probably 4 machines on a LAN behind a NAT router. I suspect that it is not, though, and thus you're almost certainly underestimating the number of installed systems.
That doesn't mean the metric is worthless though, if anything it makes it more useful to use in badgering hardware manufacturers, since you can pretty reliably quote it as a minimum. E.g., "there are at least 1M people using this software as of 1Q07, probably more..."
There might be an outcry if Microsoft did that, just because people hate Microsoft and think Microsoft is evil, but that wouldn't mean that doing it would be evil. (So, Microsoft may in fact be evil, but not necessarily everything they do is evil, and moreover, just because they could do something, doesn't make it evil.)
There's nothing wrong with saying "x people accessed Windows Update this [year|month|day]." That's no different from the hit counters that used to exist on every web site. (And which were tacky, and I thank God that people finally realized this.)
What would be evil, and the temptation they need to avoid, is to take their server logs and start mining them for data that can be sold or used for malicious purposes; i.e. personally identifying information about what users are using what versions of Windows, or even how often they're updating, etc.
Aggregate information about hits is something that HTTP servers and their operators do all the time. Where it gets evil is when you have cookies tracking particular users across multiple sites, etc.
Luckily there are still USB floppy drives available, so even if your mobo lacks a "real" FD controller, you can still read the disks.
I wouldn't waste too much time before you archive them, though; drives are only going to get harder to find, and the media itself that you have stuff stored on ain't getting any younger.
A slight bit of irony, though: years ago, when I first got an Iomega Zip disk, I was sure that it was going to replace floppies completely. (And for a while it seemed like it; there were some Macs in the late 90s that shipped with Zips in place of the FD drive.) So I dutifully backed up all my old floppies onto Zip disks. Not that long ago, when I decided it was time to retire the Zip for good, I went to pull the data off of its cartridges and back them up on CD-R...only to find that the disks were plagued with the "clicks." I had to go back to the floppies to get the old stuff again.
Taught me two good lessons: 1) always roll backups onto new media whenever possible (I should have backed those Zips up to CD-R as soon as I got a disc burner), but more importantly 2) don't ever trust that the new media will be more robust than the old. Even now, I still have the floppies stored along with the CDs (and now DVD+Rs), because I'm not sure which will last longer. Might as well cover all the bases.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you completely, but I think you're giving Windows and Office in particular far too much credit.
Where would we be without Windows and Office? It's hard to say, but I don't think either one really brought along a whole lot of features that wouldn't have existed elsewhere. The main thing they brought to the table, is the creation of a de facto standard, but I'm entirely unconvinced that this wouldn't have happened in their absence. Obviously, having a standard format in which to interchange documents is a Good Thing. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out; if Microsoft had never existed (and no other company had stepped in at the right time and managed to grab 90+% of the desktop computer market), standardization under some body independent of the software companies probably would have happened a lot faster.
The technology, computers and networking in general, have without a doubt brought vast benefits to humanity in terms of increased efficiency. But I don't think that Windows and Office have really added much that wouldn't have existed otherwise. If anything, there's a good argument to be made that they've actually stifled innovation, and held back the technology from where it would have brought us without them.
It's not as though, had Windows never been released, that the world would still be sitting around with PC-DOS on 286s. We'd just be using some other OS, and some other office suite; probably more than one OS and more than one office suite. Microsoft and its products took advantage of the developments in technology, and jumped on during a time of incredible advancement, and established themselves in a position that they're basically impossible to dislodge now. But they didn't create the driving force that propelled them there. It could have just as easily propelled Apple, or IBM, or some other company who didn't happen to be there at the right time and in the right place, and whose name has now been forgotten.
As for your other comments about teachers bringing their own equipment, there are some professions where tools are the responsibility of the tradesman or worker to provide, and some where they're the responsibility and property of the employer. I work in software development, and I don't bring my own workstation -- my employer gives me one to use while I'm at work. (I bring in my own mouse and keyboard, but that's just because I don't like theirs.) Auto mechanics and carpenters have their own tools, granted, but it's mostly for historical/traditional reasons, and because people have differing preferences of tools (Snap-On vs. Craftsman, etc.). Bringing personally-owned tools to work is more of an exception than a rule, and I don't know of any reason why a teacher would be more like an auto mechanic (own personal tools) than a software developer (use employer's tools).
The difference between the "prediction market" you're talking about, and the actual stock market, is that in the prediction market, the bettors (for that's what they really are) don't determine the outcome.
If you bet on whether Obama is going to be the next Democratic presidential candidate, your bet doesn't directly influence the outcome (except perhaps in some very indirect, butterfly-effect-like fashion, but we'll ignore that). The two are independent. It's just like betting on a horse race, or a football game, or anything else. You're trying to determine what the outcome will be, but unless someone in the game is crooked, what the crowd thinks the outcome will be, doesn't affect the results.
In the stock market, things are more complicated: the value of the shares are the direct result of what people are willing to pay for them. So if I think that a stock is going to increase in value, and want to buy some of it, I'm going to offer slightly more than the price it's currently trading at, in order to acquire some. If I buy a lot of it, or if a lot of people do that, it'll cause the price to increase all by itself. It's as though, by betting on a horse, or on Obama, you actually make them more likely to win whatever event they're competing in.
I think (recalling the last time I bothered to read the Windows EULA) that you are correct about point A, a big part of the agreement is an indemnification of them for basically everything and anything, but I'm not so sure about point B. I don't recall anything in the EULA about audits. It's possible there are audit rights in the corporate site licenses, though.
But as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the BSA doesn't really even use the EULA, and they for the most part don't even use the legal system except as a bludgeon. They merely threaten to sue (which would presumably allow them to perform a license audit as part of discovery, and generally trash your business and distract your employees for a few weeks), and most companies roll over. The companies that have pockets deep enough to really fight with the BSA, like IBM, mostly don't get tousled with anyway.
It's a straightforward extortion scheme; they don't need anything in the EULA to enable them. They just threaten to create an obnoxious and expensive lawsuit, until you agree to let them in to do their audit, during which will inevitably find license issues, following which they will make up some figure to charge you as a "settlement" to avoid court.
There's not much complexity to it: first, they come to you, and say "let us perform an audit, or we'll sue you, get a court order, and come back and do it anyway." So, you try to get your licenses in order, and let them in to do their audit. They refuse to honor whatever evidence you thought was going to assuage them, and tell you that you're non-compliant. They then threaten to sue you again, and this time they have "evidence" (which you conveniently handed them, when you let them do their audit). At this point, you're stuck, and they know it, so they toss you an 'out' in the form of some settlement, which you would have laughed at initially, but now happily pay.
They don't need anything in the EULA to accomplish that con; it's just a straightforward intimidation game. They're bigger than you, and have more lawyers, therefore you lose.
Er, it would be nice if that were the case, but it's not so. In every state I've lived in, you could get your license suspended for failure to pay municipal parking tickets.
Here's some information on Connecticut's policy (read about halfway down, or search for "Unpaid Connecticut parking tickets"), and Googling "license suspension unpaid parking tickets" will find you many more states. Generally, you get a written warning note in the mail telling you to pony up, and if you don't, then they'll pull your license, at which point in order to drive again, you have to pay the fines, any late fees on them, and an additional $100+ to get your license back.
"I'm sorry, but we don't officially support the linux operating system". This way they get drivers written for them for free, and don't need to provide any tech support for the device to those users who purchase it for linux. Anyone else see this happening?
Sounds fine to me. It beats the hell out of the current situation, where the companies don't support Linux at all, don't release specs on the hardware, and the drivers are either crummy compile-it-yourself alpha versions, only available for stuff that's 18 months out of date and gone from store shelves, or nonexistent.
I'll take unofficial quasi-support that results in timely, working drivers, over complete ignorance of the platform that results in nothing, any day.
Furthermore, the situation is only going to get worse unless we can get hardware manufacturers on board. More and more peripheral devices are dumping Flash and EPROMs for non-static RAM and firmware blobs that are loaded by the driver. 90% of the time, it's utterly impossible to reverse-engineer the on-device firmware without help from the manufacturer, and it's generally illegal to distribute their firmware blobs without permission. Unless they cooperate, and give Linux developers some specs, and permission to distribute the firmware blobs, getting a Linux system up and running on new hardware is going to become a major chore.
If you think the situation is bad now, just wait until every Ethernet card on the market uses a firmware image that's loaded by the (Windows-only) driver, and in order to get the system running, you need to download the driver and extract the firmware yourself (because it'll be illegal to distribute). You'll have to go to the manufacturer's web site, download the Win98 driver, extract the firmware, put it on a floppy (because, remember, the target machine's Ethernet doesn't work), install it, reboot, and pray. The situation we have with wireless cards isn't some aberration: it's the future, unless manufacturers can be convinced that supporting Linux -- officially or not -- is a Good Idea.
Starting off from a Linux LiveCD, as other people have suggested, would be the starting point.
Then you could send email using Mixmaster (only catch is you'd have to make sure it was installed on your Linux CD, and I'm not sure if it's there by default on Knoppix, so you might have to master a new image). You can also use it for anonymous Usenet posting, and in conjunction with nym servers, although I don't know if that's as secure as straightforward anonymous email. Here is a tutorial on using Mixmaster, though it's quite simple to use once you have it installed.
As a reply channel, rather than nym addresses, I'd suggest telling the recipient to post some sort of message to a public Usenet group, that you could read through a public interface (like Google Groups). This is basically the 21st century equivalent of telling someone to reply by posting a personal ad in the newspaper; you're making them publish it widely, and then reading it through channels available to anyone.
Then you could respond via mixmaster (with different remailers each time, keeping with ones located outside the U.S.).
It wouldn't be something you'd want to do for any great length of time; if you were taunting the NSA, they'd probably be able to compromise the mixmaster network eventually (by sending people with guns and rubber hoses to the operators of every remailer in the system, hijacking them, and performing traffic analysis), but it would certainly be beyond the resources of even a large corporation (unless you believe Microsoft has private death squads at its disposal, in which case maybe you're better just not publishing at all).
Quite a few very intelligent people have spent a lot of time and effort creating anonymity systems for just this sort of use; while nothing is foolproof against an adversary who can control the entire network and monitor every packet and every internet-connected system, all the time, modern systems exist that would probably provide a good challenge even to most government agencies.
I've been to Hiroshima. I've seen what's left of the Industrial Promtion Hall (so clean, it's eerie...). I heard a survivor recount how flesh peeled from people's bodies, the black rain that burned, wounds that didn't bleed but wouldn't heal. Anybody who thinks atomic bombs are "humane" has some serious functional difficulties, and literacy isn't even at the top of the list.
Ever seen napalm? White phosphorous? Thermite? They'll all melt the flesh off your bones, too, and more people met their ends that way, than have ever died in nuclear blasts. Why so much less outrage there? More people died in a night of fire-bombings of wooden cities, than in the atomic bombings; they're just more spectacular.
Nuclear weapons aren't particularly unique. Several of the invasion plans that were tossed around prior to the use of nuclear weapons on Japan involved saturating the islands with nerve gas, and just taking it by default after the population had been decimated.
I thought that the President had basically annulled that treaty, by saying that it was with a country that no longer exists, and thus is not in force anymore (or something like that).
If you look on the top of the page you linked to, it says "The State Department web site below is a permanent electronic archive of information released prior to January 20, 2001. Please see www.state.gov for material released since President George W. Bush took office on that date."
There are a lot of things that I take issue with Bush for, but this frankly isn't one of them; I've always been of a mind that it's lunacy to prevent nations from defending themselves. If the world is getting dangerous because of ICBMs, maybe that should be the focus of restrictions, not systems that protect from them. But then again, I've never been down with the whole "MAD" concept in general.
Here's the problem: there's virtually no way to get in trouble, if you just release an exploit anonymously. (By definition, if it's truly anonymous, they can't catch you; there are lots of ways to basically ensure your anonymity today.) Where you start to get in trouble is when you want to release an exploit that's going to ruin somebody's day and take credit for it.
This comes up with regards to other, less-politically-sensitive bugs. When you step forward and take credit for something that you've released, you're basically holding up a big "come and get me!" sign. It's a lot easier to sling mud at a person, than it is at some anonymous entity on the Internet.
It's really taking credit that burns people, not releasing the bug/hack/exploit. It would have been trivial for this guy to release his code, anonymously or even pseudonymously, and keep it firewalled from his real-world identity. If he had done that, there might have been some attempts to uncover who he really was, but I doubt anyone would try that hard -- it's harder to go after someone that's anonymous, than an actual person. With a person, you have something to put in your mind under 'enemy,' that you just don't have with some vaporous person or persons on the Internet. Being anonymous diffuses a lot of the hatred, because it's harder to hate someone that might not exist. By standing up and taking credit, you're accepting everything.
Personally, if I were to discover something like this, there's no way I'd publicly admit it. I live a happy enough life without becoming some sort of hacker/security icon; the downsides of becoming the next Dimitry Sklyarov seem far greater than the possible benefits. Release the code somewhere in public, maybe signed with a private key that you have stashed away (so, decades down the line, you'd be able to claim it, if you wanted to and if the statute of limitations had run out), and only communicate via Usenet dead-drops and anonymous remailers. The tools to remain completely hidden are all there -- heck, you could probably do interviews in Wired under a psuedonym, the only absolute would be keeping the Clark-Kent-esque secret of your true identity hidden, and I'm not sure if some people would be able to swallow their pride enough to do that.
I suspect that an even larger part of school's budgets than software, are the salaries of the people who are responsible for maintaining everything; IT-types but also teachers, librarians, etc.
Those are the people who need to be "sold" on Linux or even other OSS projects like OO.org; in my experience it's a lot easier to get management on board with a solid presentation highlighting the cost savings and feature parity, but it can be quickly scuttled by the rank-and-file if they're resistant to change.
A few days ago I read another post that I think highlighted the problem. The major impediment to any sort of even slightly radical IT change, is the huge number of users who do not understand computers, or the technology they use on a daily basis. At best, they've been trained to complete certain tasks, but there's no more understanding of what's going on there, than a rat understands what goes on outside its cage when it presses on the food pedal. Do this, this happens; there's no conceptual grasp of the process, just of the procedure. This is a huge stumbling block, because it turns what someone who understands the system perceives as a trivial change, into a major one, with massive retraining costs. Something as simple as changing some menus or the "look and feel" of a dialog box can send 'trained' users back to management, demanding retraining on the new software.
I've worked on some big software projects for government users, and there have been times when entire systems have been gutted and rebuilt, but the one thing that absolutely, positively, could not change, no matter what were the user interfaces. Ripping out all the infrastructure behind the scenes was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of sending all the users to retraining courses, which is what they would demand if they noticed anything different. (In reality, this was mostly an excuse to demand a paid psuedo-vacation; travel on an expense account to someplace where they could sit around in a classroom and space out for a few days. But that's the way it works.)
Concentrating on the 'top down' and costs savings will only get you so far. Unfortunately, people at the bottom are going to resist any change at all, unless you can figure out a way to paint it so that it's to their personal advantage.
Mea culpa. Although you're right, 'facade' almost makes sense there, since what I was suggesting is that the actual frontend seen by the public -- the facade -- is only a small part of what might be a much bigger system, generating and storing all the data that's delivered in various forms to viewers. E.g., depending on how you define 'content,' the person responsible for the largest part of a big site's content might actually be the DBA of an interfaced system, rather than the 'webmaster' of the frontend.
It's really late... I don't even know what I'm doing awake at this point.:)
I don't think the job is gone, but perhaps the title is. "Webmaster" has been rolled into other jobs, because management of a public-facing web site is increasingly just one facade of a far more important job, management of a company's entire systems, which falls generally to the CIO, and then gets delegated from there down to a particular person or group.
I can think of a lot of web sites where 90+% of the content isn't part of the "site" per se, but part of databases that are somehow interfaced into the site (CRM systems, accounting, etc.). The "webmaster"'s job can be a lot more like a circus ringleader, trying to keep everyone happy and plugged in.
In line with the increasing managerial responsibilities, the title of "webmaster" may have disappeared into various "Information Systems" titles. The job is still there, somewhere, but it's called something different.
Well, in the example I was talking about, you can look at Yahoo's and decide for yourself. It looks suspiciously intentional to me, because it's a blob right in the middle of a lot of high-rez imagery that's suddenly pixellated, centered right over the bridge, but I suppose there could be less nefarious (but seemingly less likely) reasons.
It's interesting to note that Google's source for the images is the Maine Office of GIS. Yahoo's doesn't list a source that I can see, but the photos look dramatically different (they look like they were taken during the summer or late spring -- hence, green -- instead of the winter or early spring / mud season of Google's).
The "censoring" in Yahoo's takes out not only the bridge and the Maine Hydro plant at Great Falls, which is the only even halfway "strategic" target in that area, but also a whole lot of the industrial buildings on the Lewiston (east) side, which if memory serves are mostly abandoned, with one shoe factory. On the Auburn (west, left) side, most of a city park is obscured. They're applying the blur tool rather liberally, if that's what they're doing.
At risk of exposing my ignorance here (I'm a Debian person; the last time I did anything RedHat-based was before automatic package management), what is CentOS's automatic-update feature like? Does it have one?
I assume it uses yum, or something like it, being RedHat, but does it pull from RedHat's servers directly, or are there separate CentOS repositories? I assume it's the latter. In that case, how closely do the CentOS repos track the 'official' RHEL ones, in terms of patches and bugfixes? Not that you'd probably want to do it on a true 'production' system, but can you do the CentOS equivalent of 'apt-get upgrade' and be reasonably assured of not breaking things?
I've always been intrigued with CentOS, and it does seem to have a good reputation as far as stability is concerned, but after growing up with apt-get (and before that, nightmarish experiences with dependency hell on some very early RedHat systems), I've developed a certain perhaps-unwarranted negative bias of everything else.
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It's more than cost-per-MB; in terms of that, floppies are actually quite hideously expensive and have been for some time. (The last time I bothered to compare was in 2004, but at that point floppies were $130 per GB, while DVD-Rs were around $0.20, you can see a chart here.) The niche that floppies filled, though, wasn't just "cheap storage," but individually cheap (to the point where the value of each disk was basically negligible) disks, and ubiquitously available drives, that were fast and easy to use (no burning to CD), reusable, and physically robust.
I agree with the GGP (parent to my original post) that there really isn't a direct replacement for floppies; instead, their duties have been split among a variety of new technologies. People who still need to move files between computers that aren't networked, can use USB keychain drives. Most people, who are on networked computers, just use email or other network services. Big files or large presentations can be put on CD or DVD; same with backups.
Floppies were unique in their time, because they did basically all of these duties (although, arguably none of them as well as what has replaced them in each case). I doubt that we'll see another technology do as many things as it did; the future is in more specialized tools.
To be honest I've never tried. I use it mostly with my newer Macs, which won't boot from floppies (IIRC: System 8 and later were too big to fit on a 1.44MB disk, even in their most minimal configurations, and most Macs without internal FDs won't boot under System 7, which was the last one that you could slim down far enough). I think that the elimination of the ability to boot into System 7, and thus use floppies as a recovery mechanism, was one of the things that actually allowed Apple to get rid of the floppy drive so early. Everything was already designed around booting from CDs. (That, and Macs don't have an upgradeable BIOS.)
I assume on a PC, that you'd be at the mercy of the BIOS, and whether it had a boot-from-USB option. (I'd hope that if the manufacturer omitted an actual FD controller that they would offer this as an option; it's a bit of a Catch-22 if they don't...)
I'm not a datacenter operator, but don't most rackmount servers have RS232 ports? I would think those would be more useful than a PS/2 keyboard, as long as the BIOS supports it (and I'd hope any self-respecting server would). I'd rather deal with serial lines and a serial switchbox than full-on KVM, with VGA and PS/2, for a whole rack's worth of 1Us.
It drives me nuts that they've gotten rid of serial ports on some low-end consumer boxes; I would hope that they're not taking it off of server mobos, particularly ones that are designed for headless operation, since it ought to be the natural choice for a "local console." Heck, get rid of the graphics chips and VGA before you get rid of RS232!
I discovered with windows 95 that I am an unfortunate person who ruins 3.5 disks when holding them too long.
... I have to ask. How does that work? Do you produce some strange magnetic field or something?
Okay
I think you have a good point -- there really isn't anything that's the exact match for a floppy, in terms of cheap, ubiquitous storage -- but I think the demand for it has decreased to the point where people will only miss it occasionally.
I used to keep stacks of floppies sitting around, mostly ones conveniently sent to my home by the kind folks at America Online, to give to people when they needed some document or other. I rarely got them back, and it was understood that discs just sort of circulated around, like some sort of valueless currency. When you needed one, you just looked around until you found one (that looked disused) and did whatever you had to do.
Email has really replaced floppies. Not just email as a service, because obviously email has been around for decades, and floppies didn't decline in popularity until the last few years, but near-universal access to email, with the capability of receiving nontrivial attachments (greater than a few K but less than a few MB), and always-on connectivity. Before you had that, giving someone a floppy with a document was the most convenient method. Now, email is by far easier. If I was working on something, and needed to give someone a copy, using removable storage wouldn't be my first thought: instead I'd just send it to them.
The kind of removable storage you're talking about is only necessary for a few cases, either where the file is too big to be practically attached to an email, or the person doesn't have an email address (rare, these days) or other internet access to receive it. So in those cases, CD-R or CD-RW are made to suffice.
Overall, mini CDs or business-card CD-Rs would be a good candidate for replacement (and it's really not hard to put them in a little vinyl sleeve to keep them from getting scratched; 5.25" floppies didn't last long outside a paper sleeve either), but the market for them is just so limited that the economies of scale don't exist to make them as cheap as floppies were.
Alas, I have no dvd burner, so I'm still stuck with CDs.
... how do you stand it? And what do you carry your backup sets around in, a wheelbarrow? :)
... another hard drive. I don't know what the magnetic tape people have been doing while the hard drive engineers have been working, but they really haven't kept up very well.
Good god
Do your back a favor; you can get a DVD+R for less than $30 these days. (I have heard that DVD+R is better for long-term storage than -R, although it's a moot point these days because even the cheapest drives burn both.) Which is painful, because not that long ago I paid almost $500 for one, but I guess that's technology.
Not that backing up a modern hard drive to DVDs is even particularly fun; it's getting to the point where the best backup media for a hard drive is
IIRC you could rig up a floppy drive, so long as you were willing to solder 20 pins next to the sound chip.
Or if you were capable of walking to CompUSA and buying a $20 Imation USB Floppy drive. (It even came in Bondi Blue.)
Not to mention multiple computers hiding behind NAT; they would probably appear to be one system, due to the single IP address, unless the software for determining "hits" is smart enough to look at the transactions and realize that the same IP address just requested the same data 4 times over, and thus is probably 4 machines on a LAN behind a NAT router. I suspect that it is not, though, and thus you're almost certainly underestimating the number of installed systems.
That doesn't mean the metric is worthless though, if anything it makes it more useful to use in badgering hardware manufacturers, since you can pretty reliably quote it as a minimum. E.g., "there are at least 1M people using this software as of 1Q07, probably more..."
There might be an outcry if Microsoft did that, just because people hate Microsoft and think Microsoft is evil, but that wouldn't mean that doing it would be evil. (So, Microsoft may in fact be evil, but not necessarily everything they do is evil, and moreover, just because they could do something, doesn't make it evil.)
There's nothing wrong with saying "x people accessed Windows Update this [year|month|day]." That's no different from the hit counters that used to exist on every web site. (And which were tacky, and I thank God that people finally realized this.)
What would be evil, and the temptation they need to avoid, is to take their server logs and start mining them for data that can be sold or used for malicious purposes; i.e. personally identifying information about what users are using what versions of Windows, or even how often they're updating, etc.
Aggregate information about hits is something that HTTP servers and their operators do all the time. Where it gets evil is when you have cookies tracking particular users across multiple sites, etc.
Luckily there are still USB floppy drives available, so even if your mobo lacks a "real" FD controller, you can still read the disks.
I wouldn't waste too much time before you archive them, though; drives are only going to get harder to find, and the media itself that you have stuff stored on ain't getting any younger.
A slight bit of irony, though: years ago, when I first got an Iomega Zip disk, I was sure that it was going to replace floppies completely. (And for a while it seemed like it; there were some Macs in the late 90s that shipped with Zips in place of the FD drive.) So I dutifully backed up all my old floppies onto Zip disks. Not that long ago, when I decided it was time to retire the Zip for good, I went to pull the data off of its cartridges and back them up on CD-R...only to find that the disks were plagued with the "clicks." I had to go back to the floppies to get the old stuff again.
Taught me two good lessons: 1) always roll backups onto new media whenever possible (I should have backed those Zips up to CD-R as soon as I got a disc burner), but more importantly 2) don't ever trust that the new media will be more robust than the old. Even now, I still have the floppies stored along with the CDs (and now DVD+Rs), because I'm not sure which will last longer. Might as well cover all the bases.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you completely, but I think you're giving Windows and Office in particular far too much credit.
Where would we be without Windows and Office? It's hard to say, but I don't think either one really brought along a whole lot of features that wouldn't have existed elsewhere. The main thing they brought to the table, is the creation of a de facto standard, but I'm entirely unconvinced that this wouldn't have happened in their absence. Obviously, having a standard format in which to interchange documents is a Good Thing. You don't have to be a genius to figure that out; if Microsoft had never existed (and no other company had stepped in at the right time and managed to grab 90+% of the desktop computer market), standardization under some body independent of the software companies probably would have happened a lot faster.
The technology, computers and networking in general, have without a doubt brought vast benefits to humanity in terms of increased efficiency. But I don't think that Windows and Office have really added much that wouldn't have existed otherwise. If anything, there's a good argument to be made that they've actually stifled innovation, and held back the technology from where it would have brought us without them.
It's not as though, had Windows never been released, that the world would still be sitting around with PC-DOS on 286s. We'd just be using some other OS, and some other office suite; probably more than one OS and more than one office suite. Microsoft and its products took advantage of the developments in technology, and jumped on during a time of incredible advancement, and established themselves in a position that they're basically impossible to dislodge now. But they didn't create the driving force that propelled them there. It could have just as easily propelled Apple, or IBM, or some other company who didn't happen to be there at the right time and in the right place, and whose name has now been forgotten.
As for your other comments about teachers bringing their own equipment, there are some professions where tools are the responsibility of the tradesman or worker to provide, and some where they're the responsibility and property of the employer. I work in software development, and I don't bring my own workstation -- my employer gives me one to use while I'm at work. (I bring in my own mouse and keyboard, but that's just because I don't like theirs.) Auto mechanics and carpenters have their own tools, granted, but it's mostly for historical/traditional reasons, and because people have differing preferences of tools (Snap-On vs. Craftsman, etc.). Bringing personally-owned tools to work is more of an exception than a rule, and I don't know of any reason why a teacher would be more like an auto mechanic (own personal tools) than a software developer (use employer's tools).
The difference between the "prediction market" you're talking about, and the actual stock market, is that in the prediction market, the bettors (for that's what they really are) don't determine the outcome.
If you bet on whether Obama is going to be the next Democratic presidential candidate, your bet doesn't directly influence the outcome (except perhaps in some very indirect, butterfly-effect-like fashion, but we'll ignore that). The two are independent. It's just like betting on a horse race, or a football game, or anything else. You're trying to determine what the outcome will be, but unless someone in the game is crooked, what the crowd thinks the outcome will be, doesn't affect the results.
In the stock market, things are more complicated: the value of the shares are the direct result of what people are willing to pay for them. So if I think that a stock is going to increase in value, and want to buy some of it, I'm going to offer slightly more than the price it's currently trading at, in order to acquire some. If I buy a lot of it, or if a lot of people do that, it'll cause the price to increase all by itself. It's as though, by betting on a horse, or on Obama, you actually make them more likely to win whatever event they're competing in.
I think (recalling the last time I bothered to read the Windows EULA) that you are correct about point A, a big part of the agreement is an indemnification of them for basically everything and anything, but I'm not so sure about point B. I don't recall anything in the EULA about audits. It's possible there are audit rights in the corporate site licenses, though.
But as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, the BSA doesn't really even use the EULA, and they for the most part don't even use the legal system except as a bludgeon. They merely threaten to sue (which would presumably allow them to perform a license audit as part of discovery, and generally trash your business and distract your employees for a few weeks), and most companies roll over. The companies that have pockets deep enough to really fight with the BSA, like IBM, mostly don't get tousled with anyway.
It's a straightforward extortion scheme; they don't need anything in the EULA to enable them. They just threaten to create an obnoxious and expensive lawsuit, until you agree to let them in to do their audit, during which will inevitably find license issues, following which they will make up some figure to charge you as a "settlement" to avoid court.
There's not much complexity to it: first, they come to you, and say "let us perform an audit, or we'll sue you, get a court order, and come back and do it anyway." So, you try to get your licenses in order, and let them in to do their audit. They refuse to honor whatever evidence you thought was going to assuage them, and tell you that you're non-compliant. They then threaten to sue you again, and this time they have "evidence" (which you conveniently handed them, when you let them do their audit). At this point, you're stuck, and they know it, so they toss you an 'out' in the form of some settlement, which you would have laughed at initially, but now happily pay.
They don't need anything in the EULA to accomplish that con; it's just a straightforward intimidation game. They're bigger than you, and have more lawyers, therefore you lose.
Er, it would be nice if that were the case, but it's not so. In every state I've lived in, you could get your license suspended for failure to pay municipal parking tickets.
Here's some information on Connecticut's policy (read about halfway down, or search for "Unpaid Connecticut parking tickets"), and Googling "license suspension unpaid parking tickets" will find you many more states. Generally, you get a written warning note in the mail telling you to pony up, and if you don't, then they'll pull your license, at which point in order to drive again, you have to pay the fines, any late fees on them, and an additional $100+ to get your license back.
I guess the competition is working on a Coyote project?
I think the Acme Corporation got prime on that contract. Their past performance was a bit sketchy, but they were the low bid...
"I'm sorry, but we don't officially support the linux operating system". This way they get drivers written for them for free, and don't need to provide any tech support for the device to those users who purchase it for linux. Anyone else see this happening?
Sounds fine to me. It beats the hell out of the current situation, where the companies don't support Linux at all, don't release specs on the hardware, and the drivers are either crummy compile-it-yourself alpha versions, only available for stuff that's 18 months out of date and gone from store shelves, or nonexistent.
I'll take unofficial quasi-support that results in timely, working drivers, over complete ignorance of the platform that results in nothing, any day.
Furthermore, the situation is only going to get worse unless we can get hardware manufacturers on board. More and more peripheral devices are dumping Flash and EPROMs for non-static RAM and firmware blobs that are loaded by the driver. 90% of the time, it's utterly impossible to reverse-engineer the on-device firmware without help from the manufacturer, and it's generally illegal to distribute their firmware blobs without permission. Unless they cooperate, and give Linux developers some specs, and permission to distribute the firmware blobs, getting a Linux system up and running on new hardware is going to become a major chore.
If you think the situation is bad now, just wait until every Ethernet card on the market uses a firmware image that's loaded by the (Windows-only) driver, and in order to get the system running, you need to download the driver and extract the firmware yourself (because it'll be illegal to distribute). You'll have to go to the manufacturer's web site, download the Win98 driver, extract the firmware, put it on a floppy (because, remember, the target machine's Ethernet doesn't work), install it, reboot, and pray. The situation we have with wireless cards isn't some aberration: it's the future, unless manufacturers can be convinced that supporting Linux -- officially or not -- is a Good Idea.
Starting off from a Linux LiveCD, as other people have suggested, would be the starting point.
Then you could send email using Mixmaster (only catch is you'd have to make sure it was installed on your Linux CD, and I'm not sure if it's there by default on Knoppix, so you might have to master a new image). You can also use it for anonymous Usenet posting, and in conjunction with nym servers, although I don't know if that's as secure as straightforward anonymous email. Here is a tutorial on using Mixmaster, though it's quite simple to use once you have it installed.
As a reply channel, rather than nym addresses, I'd suggest telling the recipient to post some sort of message to a public Usenet group, that you could read through a public interface (like Google Groups). This is basically the 21st century equivalent of telling someone to reply by posting a personal ad in the newspaper; you're making them publish it widely, and then reading it through channels available to anyone.
Then you could respond via mixmaster (with different remailers each time, keeping with ones located outside the U.S.).
It wouldn't be something you'd want to do for any great length of time; if you were taunting the NSA, they'd probably be able to compromise the mixmaster network eventually (by sending people with guns and rubber hoses to the operators of every remailer in the system, hijacking them, and performing traffic analysis), but it would certainly be beyond the resources of even a large corporation (unless you believe Microsoft has private death squads at its disposal, in which case maybe you're better just not publishing at all).
Quite a few very intelligent people have spent a lot of time and effort creating anonymity systems for just this sort of use; while nothing is foolproof against an adversary who can control the entire network and monitor every packet and every internet-connected system, all the time, modern systems exist that would probably provide a good challenge even to most government agencies.
I've been to Hiroshima. I've seen what's left of the Industrial Promtion Hall (so clean, it's eerie...). I heard a survivor recount how flesh peeled from people's bodies, the black rain that burned, wounds that didn't bleed but wouldn't heal. Anybody who thinks atomic bombs are "humane" has some serious functional difficulties, and literacy isn't even at the top of the list.
Ever seen napalm? White phosphorous? Thermite? They'll all melt the flesh off your bones, too, and more people met their ends that way, than have ever died in nuclear blasts. Why so much less outrage there? More people died in a night of fire-bombings of wooden cities, than in the atomic bombings; they're just more spectacular.
Nuclear weapons aren't particularly unique. Several of the invasion plans that were tossed around prior to the use of nuclear weapons on Japan involved saturating the islands with nerve gas, and just taking it by default after the population had been decimated.
I thought that the President had basically annulled that treaty, by saying that it was with a country that no longer exists, and thus is not in force anymore (or something like that).
If you look on the top of the page you linked to, it says "The State Department web site below is a permanent electronic archive of information released prior to January 20, 2001. Please see www.state.gov for material released since President George W. Bush took office on that date."
A quick Google search reveals that the U.S. dumped the 1972 ABM treaty in December of 2001.
There are a lot of things that I take issue with Bush for, but this frankly isn't one of them; I've always been of a mind that it's lunacy to prevent nations from defending themselves. If the world is getting dangerous because of ICBMs, maybe that should be the focus of restrictions, not systems that protect from them. But then again, I've never been down with the whole "MAD" concept in general.
Well, he's already probably a bit screwed.
Here's the problem: there's virtually no way to get in trouble, if you just release an exploit anonymously. (By definition, if it's truly anonymous, they can't catch you; there are lots of ways to basically ensure your anonymity today.) Where you start to get in trouble is when you want to release an exploit that's going to ruin somebody's day and take credit for it.
This comes up with regards to other, less-politically-sensitive bugs. When you step forward and take credit for something that you've released, you're basically holding up a big "come and get me!" sign. It's a lot easier to sling mud at a person, than it is at some anonymous entity on the Internet.
It's really taking credit that burns people, not releasing the bug/hack/exploit. It would have been trivial for this guy to release his code, anonymously or even pseudonymously, and keep it firewalled from his real-world identity. If he had done that, there might have been some attempts to uncover who he really was, but I doubt anyone would try that hard -- it's harder to go after someone that's anonymous, than an actual person. With a person, you have something to put in your mind under 'enemy,' that you just don't have with some vaporous person or persons on the Internet. Being anonymous diffuses a lot of the hatred, because it's harder to hate someone that might not exist. By standing up and taking credit, you're accepting everything.
Personally, if I were to discover something like this, there's no way I'd publicly admit it. I live a happy enough life without becoming some sort of hacker/security icon; the downsides of becoming the next Dimitry Sklyarov seem far greater than the possible benefits. Release the code somewhere in public, maybe signed with a private key that you have stashed away (so, decades down the line, you'd be able to claim it, if you wanted to and if the statute of limitations had run out), and only communicate via Usenet dead-drops and anonymous remailers. The tools to remain completely hidden are all there -- heck, you could probably do interviews in Wired under a psuedonym, the only absolute would be keeping the Clark-Kent-esque secret of your true identity hidden, and I'm not sure if some people would be able to swallow their pride enough to do that.
I suspect that an even larger part of school's budgets than software, are the salaries of the people who are responsible for maintaining everything; IT-types but also teachers, librarians, etc.
Those are the people who need to be "sold" on Linux or even other OSS projects like OO.org; in my experience it's a lot easier to get management on board with a solid presentation highlighting the cost savings and feature parity, but it can be quickly scuttled by the rank-and-file if they're resistant to change.
A few days ago I read another post that I think highlighted the problem. The major impediment to any sort of even slightly radical IT change, is the huge number of users who do not understand computers, or the technology they use on a daily basis. At best, they've been trained to complete certain tasks, but there's no more understanding of what's going on there, than a rat understands what goes on outside its cage when it presses on the food pedal. Do this, this happens; there's no conceptual grasp of the process, just of the procedure. This is a huge stumbling block, because it turns what someone who understands the system perceives as a trivial change, into a major one, with massive retraining costs. Something as simple as changing some menus or the "look and feel" of a dialog box can send 'trained' users back to management, demanding retraining on the new software.
I've worked on some big software projects for government users, and there have been times when entire systems have been gutted and rebuilt, but the one thing that absolutely, positively, could not change, no matter what were the user interfaces. Ripping out all the infrastructure behind the scenes was a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of sending all the users to retraining courses, which is what they would demand if they noticed anything different. (In reality, this was mostly an excuse to demand a paid psuedo-vacation; travel on an expense account to someplace where they could sit around in a classroom and space out for a few days. But that's the way it works.)
Concentrating on the 'top down' and costs savings will only get you so far. Unfortunately, people at the bottom are going to resist any change at all, unless you can figure out a way to paint it so that it's to their personal advantage.
Mea culpa. Although you're right, 'facade' almost makes sense there, since what I was suggesting is that the actual frontend seen by the public -- the facade -- is only a small part of what might be a much bigger system, generating and storing all the data that's delivered in various forms to viewers. E.g., depending on how you define 'content,' the person responsible for the largest part of a big site's content might actually be the DBA of an interfaced system, rather than the 'webmaster' of the frontend.
... I don't even know what I'm doing awake at this point. :)
It's really late
I don't think the job is gone, but perhaps the title is. "Webmaster" has been rolled into other jobs, because management of a public-facing web site is increasingly just one facade of a far more important job, management of a company's entire systems, which falls generally to the CIO, and then gets delegated from there down to a particular person or group.
I can think of a lot of web sites where 90+% of the content isn't part of the "site" per se, but part of databases that are somehow interfaced into the site (CRM systems, accounting, etc.). The "webmaster"'s job can be a lot more like a circus ringleader, trying to keep everyone happy and plugged in.
In line with the increasing managerial responsibilities, the title of "webmaster" may have disappeared into various "Information Systems" titles. The job is still there, somewhere, but it's called something different.
Well, in the example I was talking about, you can look at Yahoo's and decide for yourself. It looks suspiciously intentional to me, because it's a blob right in the middle of a lot of high-rez imagery that's suddenly pixellated, centered right over the bridge, but I suppose there could be less nefarious (but seemingly less likely) reasons.
i ne&trf=0&mvt=s&lon=-70.22285&lat=44.097109&mag=4 (I hope this link brings it up correctly)
+ maine&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=14&ll=44.10127,-70.22727&spn= 0.045795,0.107288&t=k&iwloc=addr
Here's Yahoo's (apparently censored) version:
http://maps.yahoo.com/index.php#q1=lewiston%2C+ma
And here's Google's, as close as I can match it:
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=lewiston,
It's interesting to note that Google's source for the images is the Maine Office of GIS. Yahoo's doesn't list a source that I can see, but the photos look dramatically different (they look like they were taken during the summer or late spring -- hence, green -- instead of the winter or early spring / mud season of Google's).
The "censoring" in Yahoo's takes out not only the bridge and the Maine Hydro plant at Great Falls, which is the only even halfway "strategic" target in that area, but also a whole lot of the industrial buildings on the Lewiston (east) side, which if memory serves are mostly abandoned, with one shoe factory. On the Auburn (west, left) side, most of a city park is obscured. They're applying the blur tool rather liberally, if that's what they're doing.
At risk of exposing my ignorance here (I'm a Debian person; the last time I did anything RedHat-based was before automatic package management), what is CentOS's automatic-update feature like? Does it have one?
I assume it uses yum, or something like it, being RedHat, but does it pull from RedHat's servers directly, or are there separate CentOS repositories? I assume it's the latter. In that case, how closely do the CentOS repos track the 'official' RHEL ones, in terms of patches and bugfixes? Not that you'd probably want to do it on a true 'production' system, but can you do the CentOS equivalent of 'apt-get upgrade' and be reasonably assured of not breaking things?
I've always been intrigued with CentOS, and it does seem to have a good reputation as far as stability is concerned, but after growing up with apt-get (and before that, nightmarish experiences with dependency hell on some very early RedHat systems), I've developed a certain perhaps-unwarranted negative bias of everything else.