I used to support TPM. I thought it was a great idea for enhancing system security.
I changed my mind after seeing how it ended up being abused in practice. The vendors who've implemented it demonstrated that they don't care about security, they care about lock-in and lock-out.
You misunderstand. Blocking alternate operating systems is a goal of TPM, but they've failed at it time and again. People with the know-how install whatever they want on their hardware despite their best efforts. Ergo, they have not benefitted from it.
But they have blocked the naive mom & pop user from disabling the DRM, which serves the media companies just fine.
You mean people believe pictures without wondering whether it's photoshopped?
True, this is much more advanced technology and seems to be amazingly effective, but a good photoshop editor has been able to fool the public for quite a long time now.
A friend of mine corrected some misunderstandings on Facebook.
AmigaDOS was actually based on a Motorola 68000 port of an earlier effort called TRIPOS.
TRIPOS was originally developed started in 1976 at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The M68000 port that became AmigaDOS was at the University of Bath, also in the UK.
So if Carl Sassenrath was born in California, he must have been a student in the UK.
Once you start down the rabbit hole of computing history, you soon realize that no matter how creative you think you are, someone probably came up with idea first.
Really? Here all these years I thought it was a UK Master's thesis project.
I'm glad you mentioned his name. The original reason I was searching the Amiga history pages was to try and remember his name so I could give him a little credit and maybe find out what he's doing today.
Could someone please mod parent up so people know who the creative mastermind behind the OS was?
The Amiga 500 was released to the public at the January 1987 Consumer Electronics Show. The Macintosh 128K was released to the public January 1984. Just in case anyone thought I wouldn't give credit to the first commercialization of Xerox PARC's research.
I loved my Amiga 500. In it's day, it was so incredibly powerful with it's hardware-accelerated GUI, sound hardware, and rich OS API. Incredible to think that the core of the OS was written in a matter of weeks by a British student.
But there is nothing special about it any more, save fond memories. Everyone has hardware acceleration and a GUI nowadays, even the cheapest of smartphones and netbooks.
The OS was not complete, and missed many features we now take for granted. There's no point itemizing the details, because they don't matter. Suffice to say that the glory days of the OS are lost in the sands of time. The world has moved on.
This new machine will either be running a completely different or seriously upgraded OS. If that new OS provides POSIX APIs and other interfaces that are important, it might see a new community of ported software. But if it's the old Amiga OS API, why would anyone want to develop for a proprietary OS with zero market share?
Wind is filling in the footprints that the Amiga trod in the sands of time. Soon there will be nothing left but dunes. All that's left is a brand name.
All the articles are free advertising for Apple. The company doesn't care whether the readers and posters are for or against their products. Just so long as you talk about them and spread the name.
Nor is it limited to SlashDot -- the article titles and summaries are broadcast to social media sites as well, pushing the Apple name into the public eye without comment.
There are too many issues of lock-in and lock-out associated with so-called "Trusted Computing", in particular the potential to block users from installing their operating system of choice on the hardware they own.
So far the TPM initiatives deployed by the vendors have failed one after the other. X-Box, PS3, smart phones -- every TPM system I know of to date has failed to provide the protection promised, while restricting freedom of choice by the general public.
As a result, the only ones who really benefit from TPM are those who want to implement hardware DRM (digital restrictions management.) I'm not willing to give up my software freedoms to support the media companies.
You do understand the importance of prior art for the inevitable patents and lawsuits that follow every product introduction Apple has done for the past several years? They've become much more damaging to the technology landscape than Microsoft's embrace-and-extend ever were. Microsoft tried to lock customers in; Apple is trying to eliminate competition entirely through legal means.
Why is every generation so naive as to think their use of an old technology is always revolutionary instead of evolutionary? Why the incessant greedy claims of "my favourite brand did it first" in the face of facts?
No doubt Siri has advanced and evolved compared to early relases of Dragon, but people have been working on the idea and enhancing long before your iPhone existed.
You young/'uns really need to do more reading up on relevant histry and come to the realization that the only thing holding us back has been lack of portable CPU power. A buddy of mine combined his AI and graphics classes, for example, coming up with a project that did image analysis to identify the human, analyze it, and target the torso. It took over 8 hours to run on the old 1MIP VAX, but it did work. Audio analysis was being done (i.e. voice recognition), just far from realtime.
So you're saying that automating the copy-paste from a Dragon Naturally Speaking document and pasting it into the search bar is novel enough to warrant a patent and praise? Don't confuse the first to do it that you've heard of with meaning they were the first to think of it.
You're still assuming that I have any grasp of why a cross-site scripting issue would affect running Javascript.
You also assume that I knew NoScript has to be enabled on a per-site basis, rather than defaulting to "On" like AdBlock Plus. Having never been paranoid enough to shut off JavaScript, I've never installed NoScript and would never even consider developing a real application to work around the limitations that requirement would impose. What's next? Demand for lynx support?
The Turing Test is only step one. There are other ways to evaluate AI capabilities, and other aspects of intelligence than participating in one-on-one communications. There are chatbots which have done very well on the Turing Test, but they fail other subsequent tests.
Self-driving cars and a host of very useful applications can be serviced by an expert system and a few learning algorithms. But you'd never want a true AI driving your car, because you'd have to teach it HOW first. An expert system with a pre-loaded rule base services the need, but without actual intelligence. Ideally, expert systems are predictable in their responses, not creative. Intelligence requires a demonstration of initiative and goal setting, not just stimuli response based on some canned logic and simple rules.
Even Watson isn't an AI, and it requires a hell of a lot more system resources than Siri, and I seriously doubt this web-enabled search engine binding is delivering that kind of capacity on a per-user basis, either. Does Watson learn new languages without intervention or training? Can it come up with concepts to seek out on the internet and learn about? Has it ever achieved creativity, even at the primitive level of a child's crayon drawing?
My point is that you are providing the human intelligence to work with that tool. You do the layouts, you tie it to data, even if it's at a higher level than raw HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Neuron Data's Open Interface used to be an abstract GUI toolkit that ran on Unix/X-11 systems, Windows, and Apple MacOS. You could stick with their abstract widgets and knock off an interface pretty quickly, but if you needed to do real customization, the hooks were still there to extend and customize how things looked, right down to creating custom widgets.
Don't confuse the power of a 4GL to deal with a basic 80% line of business application with the ability to deal with the fundamental complexity of a real system. If line of business needs suited everyone, we'd have all been using something like MS Access for years.
Didn't the old services like AOL used to restrict the number of messages you could send? I don't remember for sure, but I seem to recall people complaining about something like that.
The first release of any service has to start with some sort of limitation on what users can do in order to throttle the service volume while they work out what users actual needs are and what it's really costing to serve those needs. But you have to start somewhere to get out the door.
I remember the same arguments being raised 20 years ago when people were shifting workloads from mainframes and VAXes to the new-fangled early Unix systems and PCs. Who in their right mind would risk losing it all to a disk crash? Unix systems are unreliable!
I don't agree with putting everything on the cloud myself, and I hate it's very name (it's nothing more than a geographically distributed server cluster -- nothing new to the international businesses I've programmed for over the years.) But I digress...
You can buy a software package, install it locally, do your own backups, and comfort yourself that you're in total control. Or you can choose to outsource your services and storage, sign up for a service level agreement, and let someone else take care of it. Either approach has risks, and it's up to the user or business to decide which are more important risks to cover.
Most businesses don't want a local tech support team -- it's not what their core business is. Sorry, but the glory days of hiding out in the office of a mom & pop business hacking away at the systems and software are coming to an end. Those jobs are being outsourced and serviced. Did you think programmers were immune to change?
I don't like it any more than anyone else. I enjoyed writing batch processing and other striaght forward C code, but the 4GLs and reporting tools hit the market and those jobs went away. So started working with Oracle and embedded SQL, eventually branching out into Oracle DBA work and performance tuning. Then the East Indian contractors moved in to the Florida market and cut the rates too low for survival, so I had to change "careers" again. I did Neuron Data GUI development until the technology died, and I had to change again. You can check my resume data at Masterbranch if you're really curious where it went from there.
Life is change. You don't get a choice about whether you adapt -- the world will change with or without your approval.
It's nice to see someone presenting an honest assessment of their technology's actual capabilities instead of trying to spin it into something more than it is with buzzwords like "artificial intelligence".
"Opa is a concise and elegant language for writing distributed web applications."
It looks tighter than something like Java or C#, but it's still tied to manipulation of the DOM structures through, so it does require a solid understanding of the underlying web technologies, XML, and HTML. I don't think there's any way of avoiding that, though, because unless you expose the low-level capabilities, you limit the expressiveness of the final system.
There are no magic bullets. Tools may make it easier or do more work for you than others, but sooner or later you need human intelligence to tie it all together and make it useful.
If you're paying for support, the provider should be back-porting security fixes to earlier point releases as well. The "upgrade to fix" mentality from vendors is as bad as the "lock it down" production release.
I understand the arguments for the "lock it down" model. I really do. I've heard them all my life. I just feel it's fundamentally the wrong approach.
Third party vendors should be held responsible for keeping up to date as well. People and companies who are still in the "buy a product" mindset just aren't getting it. You buy a license. You pay for maintenance contract. The vendors keep the maintained products up to date and secure. Any vendor not doing their job gets nailed for breach of contract.
Should you choose to skip the maintenance contract, you're on your own and deserve the nightmare of obsolescence that you're encouraging.
Nonsense. The goal posts haven't moved in 20 years. The Turing Test is the first test of artificial intelligence. No one is moving the goal posts. They're just calling out the bullshit artists.
In a world of web services and modular software where everything is constantly changing, how can you continue to be so naive as to think you can put a stake in the ground and say "thou shalt be production"? What's the point of dynamically loaded modules on a JEE server (for example), if you can't install the updates for the individual modules?
Slashdot Mirror
I used to support TPM. I thought it was a great idea for enhancing system security.
I changed my mind after seeing how it ended up being abused in practice. The vendors who've implemented it demonstrated that they don't care about security, they care about lock-in and lock-out.
You misunderstand. Blocking alternate operating systems is a goal of TPM, but they've failed at it time and again. People with the know-how install whatever they want on their hardware despite their best efforts. Ergo, they have not benefitted from it.
But they have blocked the naive mom & pop user from disabling the DRM, which serves the media companies just fine.
You mean people believe pictures without wondering whether it's photoshopped?
True, this is much more advanced technology and seems to be amazingly effective, but a good photoshop editor has been able to fool the public for quite a long time now.
People have been demanding that security holes be plugged, including these web attacks.
Now they're complaining that Google fixed the problem.
Hopefully they'll stop screaming about Google taking over the world long enough to hear that it's a security fix. Sometimes fixes break existing code.
A friend of mine corrected some misunderstandings on Facebook.
AmigaDOS was actually based on a Motorola 68000 port of an earlier effort called TRIPOS.
TRIPOS was originally developed started in 1976 at the University of Cambridge in the UK. The M68000 port that became AmigaDOS was at the University of Bath, also in the UK.
So if Carl Sassenrath was born in California, he must have been a student in the UK.
Once you start down the rabbit hole of computing history, you soon realize that no matter how creative you think you are, someone probably came up with idea first.
Really? Here all these years I thought it was a UK Master's thesis project.
I'm glad you mentioned his name. The original reason I was searching the Amiga history pages was to try and remember his name so I could give him a little credit and maybe find out what he's doing today.
Could someone please mod parent up so people know who the creative mastermind behind the OS was?
I found a couple of very nice write-ups on the history of the Amiga out there:
The History of the Amiga
AmigaOS - Wikipedia
The Amiga 500 was released to the public at the January 1987 Consumer Electronics Show. The Macintosh 128K was released to the public January 1984. Just in case anyone thought I wouldn't give credit to the first commercialization of Xerox PARC's research.
I loved my Amiga 500. In it's day, it was so incredibly powerful with it's hardware-accelerated GUI, sound hardware, and rich OS API. Incredible to think that the core of the OS was written in a matter of weeks by a British student.
But there is nothing special about it any more, save fond memories. Everyone has hardware acceleration and a GUI nowadays, even the cheapest of smartphones and netbooks.
The OS was not complete, and missed many features we now take for granted. There's no point itemizing the details, because they don't matter. Suffice to say that the glory days of the OS are lost in the sands of time. The world has moved on.
This new machine will either be running a completely different or seriously upgraded OS. If that new OS provides POSIX APIs and other interfaces that are important, it might see a new community of ported software. But if it's the old Amiga OS API, why would anyone want to develop for a proprietary OS with zero market share?
Wind is filling in the footprints that the Amiga trod in the sands of time. Soon there will be nothing left but dunes. All that's left is a brand name.
All the articles are free advertising for Apple. The company doesn't care whether the readers and posters are for or against their products. Just so long as you talk about them and spread the name.
Nor is it limited to SlashDot -- the article titles and summaries are broadcast to social media sites as well, pushing the Apple name into the public eye without comment.
It's disgraceful.
I agree whole heartedly. Slashdot needs to stop shilling Apple.
There are too many issues of lock-in and lock-out associated with so-called "Trusted Computing", in particular the potential to block users from installing their operating system of choice on the hardware they own.
So far the TPM initiatives deployed by the vendors have failed one after the other. X-Box, PS3, smart phones -- every TPM system I know of to date has failed to provide the protection promised, while restricting freedom of choice by the general public.
As a result, the only ones who really benefit from TPM are those who want to implement hardware DRM (digital restrictions management.) I'm not willing to give up my software freedoms to support the media companies.
You do understand the importance of prior art for the inevitable patents and lawsuits that follow every product introduction Apple has done for the past several years? They've become much more damaging to the technology landscape than Microsoft's embrace-and-extend ever were. Microsoft tried to lock customers in; Apple is trying to eliminate competition entirely through legal means.
Is doing it with a portable CPU supposed to mean it's novel?
Dragon Naturally Speaking.
Why is every generation so naive as to think their use of an old technology is always revolutionary instead of evolutionary? Why the incessant greedy claims of "my favourite brand did it first" in the face of facts?
No doubt Siri has advanced and evolved compared to early relases of Dragon, but people have been working on the idea and enhancing long before your iPhone existed.
You young/'uns really need to do more reading up on relevant histry and come to the realization that the only thing holding us back has been lack of portable CPU power. A buddy of mine combined his AI and graphics classes, for example, coming up with a project that did image analysis to identify the human, analyze it, and target the torso. It took over 8 hours to run on the old 1MIP VAX, but it did work. Audio analysis was being done (i.e. voice recognition), just far from realtime.
Show a little respect.
Now get off my lawn. :p
So you're saying that automating the copy-paste from a Dragon Naturally Speaking document and pasting it into the search bar is novel enough to warrant a patent and praise? Don't confuse the first to do it that you've heard of with meaning they were the first to think of it.
You're still assuming that I have any grasp of why a cross-site scripting issue would affect running Javascript.
You also assume that I knew NoScript has to be enabled on a per-site basis, rather than defaulting to "On" like AdBlock Plus. Having never been paranoid enough to shut off JavaScript, I've never installed NoScript and would never even consider developing a real application to work around the limitations that requirement would impose. What's next? Demand for lynx support?
The Turing Test is only step one. There are other ways to evaluate AI capabilities, and other aspects of intelligence than participating in one-on-one communications. There are chatbots which have done very well on the Turing Test, but they fail other subsequent tests.
Self-driving cars and a host of very useful applications can be serviced by an expert system and a few learning algorithms. But you'd never want a true AI driving your car, because you'd have to teach it HOW first. An expert system with a pre-loaded rule base services the need, but without actual intelligence. Ideally, expert systems are predictable in their responses, not creative. Intelligence requires a demonstration of initiative and goal setting, not just stimuli response based on some canned logic and simple rules.
Even Watson isn't an AI, and it requires a hell of a lot more system resources than Siri, and I seriously doubt this web-enabled search engine binding is delivering that kind of capacity on a per-user basis, either. Does Watson learn new languages without intervention or training? Can it come up with concepts to seek out on the internet and learn about? Has it ever achieved creativity, even at the primitive level of a child's crayon drawing?
My point is that you are providing the human intelligence to work with that tool. You do the layouts, you tie it to data, even if it's at a higher level than raw HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Neuron Data's Open Interface used to be an abstract GUI toolkit that ran on Unix/X-11 systems, Windows, and Apple MacOS. You could stick with their abstract widgets and knock off an interface pretty quickly, but if you needed to do real customization, the hooks were still there to extend and customize how things looked, right down to creating custom widgets.
Don't confuse the power of a 4GL to deal with a basic 80% line of business application with the ability to deal with the fundamental complexity of a real system. If line of business needs suited everyone, we'd have all been using something like MS Access for years.
Here's an idea: Explain what you mean instead of assuming your audience knows the details of the issue as well as you do.
Don't give up hope on holding big business accountable.
Didn't the old services like AOL used to restrict the number of messages you could send? I don't remember for sure, but I seem to recall people complaining about something like that.
The first release of any service has to start with some sort of limitation on what users can do in order to throttle the service volume while they work out what users actual needs are and what it's really costing to serve those needs. But you have to start somewhere to get out the door.
I remember the same arguments being raised 20 years ago when people were shifting workloads from mainframes and VAXes to the new-fangled early Unix systems and PCs. Who in their right mind would risk losing it all to a disk crash? Unix systems are unreliable!
I don't agree with putting everything on the cloud myself, and I hate it's very name (it's nothing more than a geographically distributed server cluster -- nothing new to the international businesses I've programmed for over the years.) But I digress...
You can buy a software package, install it locally, do your own backups, and comfort yourself that you're in total control. Or you can choose to outsource your services and storage, sign up for a service level agreement, and let someone else take care of it. Either approach has risks, and it's up to the user or business to decide which are more important risks to cover.
Most businesses don't want a local tech support team -- it's not what their core business is. Sorry, but the glory days of hiding out in the office of a mom & pop business hacking away at the systems and software are coming to an end. Those jobs are being outsourced and serviced. Did you think programmers were immune to change?
I don't like it any more than anyone else. I enjoyed writing batch processing and other striaght forward C code, but the 4GLs and reporting tools hit the market and those jobs went away. So started working with Oracle and embedded SQL, eventually branching out into Oracle DBA work and performance tuning. Then the East Indian contractors moved in to the Florida market and cut the rates too low for survival, so I had to change "careers" again. I did Neuron Data GUI development until the technology died, and I had to change again. You can check my resume data at Masterbranch if you're really curious where it went from there.
Life is change. You don't get a choice about whether you adapt -- the world will change with or without your approval.
Are you seriously complaining that Javascript enabled technology won't work with NoScript blocking Javascript from running?
Man, I've had some good stuff in my day, but I want some of whatever you're smoking!
It's nice to see someone presenting an honest assessment of their technology's actual capabilities instead of trying to spin it into something more than it is with buzzwords like "artificial intelligence".
"Opa is a concise and elegant language for writing distributed web applications."
It looks tighter than something like Java or C#, but it's still tied to manipulation of the DOM structures through, so it does require a solid understanding of the underlying web technologies, XML, and HTML. I don't think there's any way of avoiding that, though, because unless you expose the low-level capabilities, you limit the expressiveness of the final system.
There are no magic bullets. Tools may make it easier or do more work for you than others, but sooner or later you need human intelligence to tie it all together and make it useful.
Key point: "For a given point release."
If you're paying for support, the provider should be back-porting security fixes to earlier point releases as well. The "upgrade to fix" mentality from vendors is as bad as the "lock it down" production release.
I understand the arguments for the "lock it down" model. I really do. I've heard them all my life. I just feel it's fundamentally the wrong approach.
Third party vendors should be held responsible for keeping up to date as well. People and companies who are still in the "buy a product" mindset just aren't getting it. You buy a license. You pay for maintenance contract. The vendors keep the maintained products up to date and secure. Any vendor not doing their job gets nailed for breach of contract.
Should you choose to skip the maintenance contract, you're on your own and deserve the nightmare of obsolescence that you're encouraging.
Nonsense. The goal posts haven't moved in 20 years. The Turing Test is the first test of artificial intelligence. No one is moving the goal posts. They're just calling out the bullshit artists.
In a world of web services and modular software where everything is constantly changing, how can you continue to be so naive as to think you can put a stake in the ground and say "thou shalt be production"? What's the point of dynamically loaded modules on a JEE server (for example), if you can't install the updates for the individual modules?