> the user deletes it and the data is gone from that version of the > directory, but still there..
Oh, well, sure, then, a version of "delete" that just moves the data out of the way but still leaves it easy to recover is fine. However...
> The reality would probably be in-between though - like if the user had > removed a file from the floppy, then tried to fill it up again the file > really would be destroyed.
No, see, the way I envision the interface, the user can't (easily, from the standard GUI) _delete_ the file from the floppy -- but he can _move_ it from the floppy to some other location, e.g., the My Documents folder, which results in available space on the floppy, and Bob is your uncle.
Yeah? Well, *since I posted it*, I've had a user come to me all sad-faced wanting to know how to get back his spreadsheet he deleted from his floppy disk, that had important information in it that he needs. He didn't realize it would be gone when he deleted it; he thought he'd be able to get it back. He thought it would go to the recycle bin, and he'd be able to recover it from there. Now he has to try to hunt down a copy of Norton Utilities or something, and he's not even remotely close to being sufficiently tech-savvy to have a meaningful chance of actually recovering it, but he's going to try, because he *needs* the information in that spreadsheet.
Crazy? I'll tell you what's crazy: letting people who don't understand computers have easy access to something destructive like a permanent delete feature is crazy. Anybody who doesn't understand computers well enough to fire up a command line, navigate the directory structure, and delete the file that way *SHOULD NOT BE* deleting files. The system should just move the file to a "Deleted Files" folder and leave it there. Indefinitely. What's it going to hurt, being there still? Someone's sense of aesthetics?
Note that I'm *not* talking about taking the ability to delete away at the API level. Programs would still be able to delete their temporary files that they create and so on and so forth. Web browsers could still clean out their cache. People who know what they're doing would still be able to cd oldjunk && rm -rf *
I'm just tired of telling end users, when it's too late, "You shouldn't have deleted it, if you still wanted it. No, I can't easily get it back for you. You could take the disk to data recovery specialist, but they're going to charge you real money to get the file back. No, I can't just unempty the recycle bin. Do you have backups? You should always keep more than one copy of important files, you know. Backups, yes. On a floppy disk, sure. No, don't *just* keep things on a floppy disk; the whole point of a backup is that you have two copies, such as one on the hard drive and one on the floppy disk. Yes, your computer does have a hard drive. It's inside the case. Don't worry about where it is, just keep a copy in the My Documents folder, plus another copy on a removable disk. Yes, a floppy is a removable disk. No, if you make backups now, it won't get your file back. Please, never delete anything again. No, don't delete. If you want it out of your way for a minute, just move it to a different folder. You know, a folder. You can have as many folders as you want. Just right-click and choose New Folder and type a name for the folder. You can name it anything you want... Yes, you can... no, wait, DO NOT delete folders. Ever. No. They might have files in them you want. If it's in the way, just move it out of the way. Move it to a different folder if you want. Here, look, make a folder called Junk, and anything you want to get out of the way, put it there. Then if you need it back again, you can go into Junk and get it out..."
> > you apply cryptanalysis, using the sorts of techniques discussed > > in cryptography and cryptanalysis books. > Or, alternately, you [...] coerce^h^h^h^h^hconvince the subject > to give up the "secret password".
Cryptanalysts call this "rubber hose cryptanalysis" if you coerce, or "social engineering" if you convince by more subversive and less painful means.
> Or, even less sinister, turn the subject's keyboard over, because the > damn "secret password" is Post-It (tm) noted there.
This is a form of cryptanalysis by surveillance. Any cryptanalysis book that does not at least mention these methods is not worth the paper it's printed on.
> And from a retention point of view, I don't know if you _want_ whatever > scumbag lawyer is subpoenaeing documents from you to be able to demand > that you write him a converter. I'd rather be able to say "Here are our > VisiCalc files. Enjoy!"
No, no, you can do better than that...
"Okay, these tapes contain the information you requested. These other tapes contain the in-house software that reads and writes the format that the data is in on the tapes. Now, _these_ tapes contain the in-house software that reads and writes the tapes. It all runs on TOPS-10. Enjoy! Hmmm... TOPS-10? Oh, we no longer have that, our site license ran out. You'll have to ask DEC."
> if you can get your hands on early versions of ClarisWorks
If you can get your hands on early versions of ClarisWorks, they won't run on any modern system. This is *exactly* the sort of difficulty the original question was talking about. Today, if you had ancient files and needed early versions of ClarisWorks to open them, you could probably solve the problem with a few hours of hunting around on eBay for an old 68k Mac, but with every passing year this will become more and more problematic.
Ancient AppleWorks file formats are not the best example, though, for a couple of reasons. First, AppleWorks was *the* application (not just *the* word processor, but *the* application, period) for the Apple// series, and second, the Apple// series had and has an unnaturally large hobbyist community, which makes it quite a lot easier to find accurate information, obtain old versions, and so forth.
There are much better examples of formats from about the same era that were, at the time, very popular, but today are virtually impossible to open. RapidFile springs immediately to mind. PC Write. Perhaps scarrier are the formats used by ancient backup software, such as PC Backup. Your documents could have been in a format we can still open, plain ASCII text even, and yet you could be unable to retrieve them *even* if the media are still good (which is another rather scary thing...), if the backup software's backup format is obscure.
I'm curious how easy it is to open really old Lotus 123 spreadsheets with today's spreadsheet software.
> Do you find there's a conceptual difficulty with GMail, or are you > simply unwilling to learn its system?
I find there is a lack of adequate features for handling large volumes of mail, as is the case, frankly, with any webmail system and most minimalist and end-user-oriented mail clients in general.
The filtering system, for instance, does not support regular expressions, does not support nested boolean logic, does not support flow control, cannot filter based on arbitrary headers, and has a very limited range of actions that it can take. I could go on and on about the limitations of the filtering system. It can autoforward, for instance, but it cannot automatically construct and send a reply. It can attach a label, which is nice, but the label won't cause the message to be highlighted with a different color in the message list like it would in e.g. Pegasus Mail. It cannot add the address from the From field to a mailing list, distribution list, or address book (I don't mean a general address book of all addresses you've got mail from, but one that contains only addresses from messages that trip the filter). A Gmail filter cannot strip out attachments and cannot strip out HTML and show the message as plain text. It can star the message, but there's no additional granularity of score marking.
Speaking of scoring, there is no adaptive scoring mechanism in Gmail at all. There is also no group customisation mechanism, so mailing lists are a pain. Gmail doesn't handle showing/hiding quoted portions as well as Gnus, can't correctly rewrap quoted text at all, doesn't support all three types of forwarding (inline, as attachment, and redirect without edit), and doesn't separately report numbers of read, unread, and starred messages in each folder when looking at the list of folders. What is shown in the list of folders, or in the list of messages, is not customiseable. Also the folders cannot be organized into a hierarchy of topics or prioritized with importance levels.
If I list any more things Gmail doesn't do, I risk turning this reply into a rant. I wouldn't want to do that;-) It's enough to say that the above is just a scattered sampling of a *handful* of the features a serious mail client has.
Don't get me wrong, Gmail is a lot better than Yahoo Mail and its ilk, but it's still not in anything like the same category as Pegasus Mail or Gnus, *especially* if you have to handle a lot of mail.
> > Does anybody remember what the world was like before Google? > YES I do remember you noob.
Yeah, me too.
> Google is nothing new, before them there were a few engines that did > the job fine.
In 1995 they did, but by 1998 or thereabouts, things had degenerated rather badly. It got to the point eventually where you could go through three or four *pages* of results looking for the thing you wanted. I had conditioned myself to go straight for the advanced boolean search and construct complex criteria that excluded the dross, required several keywords, and so on, just to find things. There were a number of things wrong with the major search engines right before Google came out: paid results that got mixed in with all the others, but at or near the top, rediculously excessive advertisements (to the tune of 4+ animated banners per results page, *plus* pop-ups), and the SEO people 0wned the top dozen non-paid slots for just about every search.
Then Google came along, and you could get the page you were looking for in the top three results nine times out of ten with just two keywords and no advanced logic -- which is better than web search had ever been, even in the pre-commercial era. (Back then, you could expect relevant results on the first page of ten, but they wouldn't always be at the top of the list.)
It wasn't technology, mostly, that made Google special. Sure, PageRank is nifty technology, but the thing that really sealed the deal was that they put serious effort into cleaning the junk out of the results, something that search engines for the previous couple of years had been mostly trying not to think about and in some cases actively worsening.
> tell me how data forensics deals with [a PGP Disk file]?
First you recover the PGP Disk file, using the sorts of techniques discussed in the book this review covers. Then you apply cryptanalysis, using the sorts of techniques discussed in cryptography and cryptanalysis books.
> Hah, I moved from Bittorent to newsgroups, THAT is what I call progress
You call usenet progress? I moved my filesharing from usenet to gopher, but that was too backward, so I experimented with finger and whois, but ultimately I settled on sending 360K floppy diskettes through the mail. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a big manilla envelope filled with double-sided, double-density 5.25" diskettes.
> Welcome to the 21st century. You might want to read up on [multimedia]
Yeah, right. I remember when people actually believed that multimedia would take over and everyone would be pushing around hundreds of full-length video files on their PCs. That was, what, 1997? Around the same time that the phrase "Information Superhighway" was popular, and everyone was so excited about how much a Zip disk could hold. But you know what? Like a lot of the tech-related predictions made in the 90s, it never materialized.
A few users -- maybe 10% -- got digital cameras, but that's about it. People download music and stuff from the internet, but always in hugely-compressed lossy formats, for bandwidth reasons. (Most consumer-grade digital cameras produce pretty low-quality lossily-compressed images by default, too.) A typical five-year-old end-user home desktop system at this point has a 30-40GB hard drive, of which 3-4GB is used, and the other 90% sits empty. After five years.
It's a little different for power users, but power users can download a third-party deletion app, because they're not afraid to download and install stuff.
It's the clueless people I want to prevent from deleting stuff, because for every three things they delete they're guaranteed to come to me all teary-eyed asking if one of them can be recovered. If I say, "Sorry, but you deleted it", they say, "Yeah, but can't we _un_delete it? I really need it..." If I say, "You could restore it from your last backup", they look at me like I'm Captain Bizzarroid from the planet Uznivoxite and I just asked them to wave their seven tentacles in all seven dimensions.
Heck, if there were a registry to enable the empty-the-trash feature, I guess even that would be okay, as long as it's off by default and very hard to turn on without either using regedit or downloading TweakUI. I just don't want end users finding it by accident.
> What then is delete? How does a user distinguish between "remove an > association from the blob of data" vs "remove this blob of data altogether". > Should the blob automatically delete when you remove all metadata around it? > If not, how will you find it again? If so, would you really want data > vanishing just because you removed a keyword?
If I had my way, the user interface would not provide any way to actually delete a file. Nothing good can come from that, and *plenty* of bad comes from it on a *regular* basis. Anyone who has to work with end users knows this is true.
There should be a trash bin they could throw it in, and it should sit there until the drive dies or someone wipes out the filesystem. (Or, if the drive actually runs low on space, and the swap file is not larger than a few gigabytes, the files that had been in the trash the longest could be actually deleted, after prompting the user to check if it's okay. Four nines of end users would never encounter this. If the drive runs low on space due to an enormous swap file, then the process using the largest amount of memory should be terminated, as it's obviously runaway.)
The last time an end-user *needed* to delete a file was in 1996, when the hard drive could only hold about 2GB and it was necessary to free up space. (No, don't even talk about sensitive information. If it's *actually* sensitive, just deleting the file isn't good enough anyway, and you know it.)
Third-party shareware and freeware utilities would spring up for emptying the trash. Which would be fine, because most of the people who delete things they really still want are afraid to download and install anything anyhow.
As far as removing metadata/keywords from a file... that brings up another shortcoming of current systems. If I had my way, we'd all be using filesystems that provide automatic versioning, and the metadata would be versioned as well as the contents of the file itself. So there'd still be a record of what keywords the file _used_ to have. (Yes, an automatic versioning would need an attribute that you could set on a given file or directory to prevent versioning there, which would be important for things like swapfiles and potentially useful for things like logfiles. But normal files should be versioned. It's not like you're going to fill up that 350GB hard drive with word processing documents and PowerPoint presentations, and the really big multimedia files would only have multiple versions if you were editing them, which normal users don't do; the relative few who do video editing or whatever could turn off versioning in certain folders if they see fit.)
> Why does a human have to enter the metadata? Why not let the machine do > what it can to derive what the file is about, and ask the human whether > or not it's right? Such a system can be taught to "learn" when it's right > or wrong, and it'd get better with time.
Have you ever done any AI research? Have you ever *read* about it? Does the phrase "AI-Complete" have any meaning for you?
> Think about the WinFS like Gmail, I really found the Gmail approach > useful, more if I have thousands of mail.
I disagree. I have a Gmail account, which I use for just a few things; it probably has a few hundred messages in it at this point, which is to say, practically nothing.
I also have a *real* mail account, and I get the mail from that in Gnus, and store it using the nnml backend. I have at this point about 2GB of mail stored that way on my system.
I have greater difficulty using and finding things in the gmail account.
Granted, it took longer to *learn* to use Gnus, but once I got past that initial learning point, it's significantly easier to use on a day-to-day basis. If I had to handle in Gmail all of the mail that I handle from my primary account, I could not do it.
> Some idiot UI designer probably wrote a paper about how Windows users > are confused as to where their files are located.
This is, no doubt, true. Try sometime asking an end user where he saved the last file he was working on, or where it's located. The bright ones will say "on the computer", but that's as close as they can pin it down.
Windows has actually improved considerably in this regard over the last ten years. Today under WinXP _very_ few current (as in, released a new version in the last couple of years) applications default to saving documents in the Windows directory, the root directory, or other totally-completely-inane locations, which was standard practice in 1997. Some do still default to saving within the application's install directory, but this, though not ideal, is considerably better and furthermore even this is fading fast now, presumably due to tech support issues that come up when 2% or so of the users are running without admin privs and can't save files in such locations. The My Documents icon on the desktop, which was essentially useless when it was introduced, now actually serves a purpose, and people are starting to get to the point where they can actually *find* their files.
Which, of course, introduces the risk that people will become productive, thus necessetating the move to WinFS, a filesystem based on databases, something people understand even less than hierarchies;-)
Vista is not Longhorn -- at least, not as Longhorn was envisioned at one time.
Longhorn, it was said, will use WinFS as its native filesystem. (It will include support for fat32, ntfs, fat16, iso9660, and possibly fat12, but these will be "legacy" systems, deprecated, and probably not supported for the main filesystem where the OS is installed, only for additional filesystems, such as on removable drives.) Vista will still use ntfs as its primary native filesystem; although WinFS can be added to it later, that is an add-on.
Longhorn, it was said, will include the new shell, Monad. Vista will not.
Oh, and Longhorn, it was said, will ship in 2004. Vista will not.
Vista is the Windows 98 SE of our time -- it's not the big upcoming release Microsoft has talked about for so long, and it doesn't have the capabilities that the big upcoming release was supposed to have, or in fact any new capabilities, and it's not going to be a compelling upgrade, but it has to come out, because it's just plain been *too long* since the last release and the market can't wait until the real thing is done.
Microsoft's release cycle gets lengthier with each passing year. Nine months after they finally release Vista, they'll be talking about the next big release (not the server version of Longhorn, I mean, but the successor to Longhorn), but you won't see *that* one for a good long while. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they manage to get Vista out the door in 2006 as they currently say they're fixed to do, that means they'll start talking about Blackcomb in 2007, and by 1Q2008 they'll be predicting they can have it out by "next year) (2009), but the earliest you might possibly see it on store shelves is 2012, and frankly 2015 is more likely.
This is actually good news for the OSS community. It means we have a fairly good idea what the Microsoft desktop is going to look like for the next 7-10 years. Sure, there'll be add-ons, WinFS and eventually Monad, but add-ons are add-ons; if you want add-ons on an OSS system you can have Reiser4 today (though I don't know how stable it is yet -- but WinFS hasn't even been officially released, so I guess we're okay there), and Perl6 is likely to beat Monad to market, or in any case there are a number of excellent scripting languages available today; we haven't had to get by with just a bourne shell for quite some time, to say nothing of making do with the likes of cmd.exe. (Yes, there are people who advocate doing everything in old-school sh for the portability, but they're talking about portability in terms of running on fifteen-year-old systems; the Microsoft equivalent would be writing.bat files that will run under anything from DOS 5.0 upwards.)
I guess what I'm saying is that we know what to expect. Microsoft has grown large enough to become fairly predictable. That's good for the competition.
> I bought a cross-cut shredder which reduces to fairly small pieces > (4 x 22mm). Although it might be possible to have some meaningful > information remain intact (e.g. a short account number), this is far > less probable. Even if this happens, as it's not part of a long run of > text, the context and meaning will be separated (e.g. the account number > might not be recognised as such), and unless someone *really* knows what > they're looking for, they'll probably miss it.
Dude, at this level of paranoia, why not also incinerate the pieces and then run the ashes through a blender full of sulfuric acid set to "frappe"? I mean, sure, it's overkill, but you can never have too much overkill, right?
> I think it's pretty convenient to go downstairs and walk 100 feet to > get all the basics that I need, rather than driving.
I think it's pretty convenient to be able to walk to anywhere in town, and get not just the basics but everything I need, rather than driving. I don't own a car, buy gas, pay car insurance, or spend on car repairs. I live two blocks from work, three from the post office, three from the office supply store, four from the hardware store, three blocks in the other direction from the grocery and the discount place... one block from the high school, one block in the other direction from Heise Park, four blocks from the hospital, one block from the dentist... and when I take my dog for a walk, we go out past the edge of town and across fields. It's nice.
I don't *need* to drive anywhere. What I can't buy in Galion, I buy online.
(Most folks in Galion have a car and drive around town all the time, of course, just like everywhere else in the US, but that's a *choice* people make.)
> Not to mention the incredble public funded programs that the City of > Chicago puts together, like Millenium Park, movies in the park, and > summerdance
*shrug*. You pay for all that stuff. My taxes are lower. I suppose if I actually cared for stuff like movies in the park or dance programs, I might think it was worth it, but that sort of thing really isn't my cup of tea.
I do wish we could get fluoride in the water, though, and I'm not saying cities have no advantages at all... but man, the traffic, the lines, the noise, the crowds... such horrible inconveniences you have to put up with; I wouldn't like it at all. Then there's the crime. When a car was stolen in Galion a couple months back, it was on the top of the front page of the paper. The car turned up about twenty or thirty miles away a day or two later, and that made the front page too. We don't lock our house door, day or night, whether we're home or away (though, if we didn't have a dog, we might lock it when we're away). You have no idea how convenient it is to live a life without locked doors until you've done it. (Businesses and offices do lock up at night, though; we're a small city, but we're not *that* small. I think 10-12 thousand people or so.) My parents didn't used to lock their cars in the driveway, until they got Fords, which lock themselves automatically, one of the most annoying and inconvenient security features ever devised.
> Of course, this is what human players do to each other too, trying to > ensure that the other player's models of them are wrong. There's no reason > a sophisicated bot can't pull the same kind of tricks.
This would be the poker equivalent of what Iocaine Powder did for the old rock, scissors, and paper game. It would be interesting to have an annual competition dedicated to this, where the bots play (for imaginary money, presumably) against one another and/or human players, and award some kind of gold-plated No Prize to the winning bot each year.
> WinHoldEm doesn't try to profile or model players. It just plays perfect > poker (statistically.)
In other words, it is, in RoShamBo terms, MetaMetaRandom. You can't take huge amounts of money from it, but it's not going to take anyone (well, any real player) for anything significant either.
> And against most players, that is a sure win over time.
It online poker, this is probably true. Most of the people playing online poker would probably lose their shirts if they had to play anyone who's any good.
> Even against great players, it doesn't lose over time
Here is where you're wrong. Great players, even moderately good players, know how to manipulate a predictable opponent. A great player will know, based on the odds, exactly what the stats-bot is going to do, and can take advantage of that.
> > [Games should be fun -- not business, IMHO.] > Anything that involves real money is, or becomes, business.
This is why we only play for M&Ms. We assign values to the different colors, and use them as chips. Everybody brings a pack of M&Ms to the game. Eating your profits is explicitely allowed. Somehow, mysteriously, we always seem to run out of our M&M poker chips, and then the game's over. Funny how that works.
I've heard of playing for homemade cookies, as a form of higher-stakes game, but to me it always sounded a bit too much like a way to put on weight.
> You are technically allowed to count cards. They are also technically > allowed to kick you out of their casino, and technically allowed to > blacklist you from all the casinos in the state. They don't like it > when you win.
This is probably the most important thing to understand about gambling: the house doesn't like it when you win. If possible, they will arrange things so you don't win, and failing that, they will ask you to leave.
I'm not talking about a small win here or there, obviously. That's still losing, when you average it in, and they're fine with that. I'm talking about consistent net wins.
When you understand this, you won't gamble with money you don't intend to lose.
> There's no laws against cheating, but then again, there's no laws > against kicking you out of the casino either.
Counting cards (in your head) isn't cheating. There are ways to cheat in poker, without a bot, even, but that's not one of them. Collusion is one. Stacking the deck is another, harder-to-pull-off way. Marked cards are another. Counting cards is not. All good players keep track of what cards have been played, to at least some extent. (This is true not just in Poker, but in most card games, even non-gambling ones, like euchre or bridge.) Assuming you do it in your head, not with a bot, card counting is just a game skill, the same as reading faces, memorizing tables of odds, or bluffing.
> It could be done in this way, but you'd have to bring in many other aspects > of music to get there (rhythm, tempo, timbre, range, and (shudder) harmony > for example).
Forget harmony. Really, forget it. Real music doesn't *need* harmony, because *real* music has counterpoint. Harmony is just a cheap immitation. Music that's really worth listening to has counterpoint.
I am not convinced that a computer could write the really good stuff, but you could try it. It'd be a good hobby / spare time project; as long as you enjoy playing around with it, you haven't lost anything if it doesn't end up working out.
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> the user deletes it and the data is gone from that version of the
> directory, but still there..
Oh, well, sure, then, a version of "delete" that just moves the data out of the way but still leaves it easy to recover is fine. However...
> The reality would probably be in-between though - like if the user had
> removed a file from the floppy, then tried to fill it up again the file
> really would be destroyed.
No, see, the way I envision the interface, the user can't (easily, from the standard GUI) _delete_ the file from the floppy -- but he can _move_ it from the floppy to some other location, e.g., the My Documents folder, which results in available space on the floppy, and Bob is your uncle.
> I think your talk of deleting delete is crazy
Yeah? Well, *since I posted it*, I've had a user come to me all sad-faced wanting to know how to get back his spreadsheet he deleted from his floppy disk, that had important information in it that he needs. He didn't realize it would be gone when he deleted it; he thought he'd be able to get it back. He thought it would go to the recycle bin, and he'd be able to recover it from there. Now he has to try to hunt down a copy of Norton Utilities or something, and he's not even remotely close to being sufficiently tech-savvy to have a meaningful chance of actually recovering it, but he's going to try, because he *needs* the information in that spreadsheet.
Crazy? I'll tell you what's crazy: letting people who don't understand computers have easy access to something destructive like a permanent delete feature is crazy. Anybody who doesn't understand computers well enough to fire up a command line, navigate the directory structure, and delete the file that way *SHOULD NOT BE* deleting files. The system should just move the file to a "Deleted Files" folder and leave it there. Indefinitely. What's it going to hurt, being there still? Someone's sense of aesthetics?
Note that I'm *not* talking about taking the ability to delete away at the API level. Programs would still be able to delete their temporary files that they create and so on and so forth. Web browsers could still clean out their cache. People who know what they're doing would still be able to cd oldjunk && rm -rf *
I'm just tired of telling end users, when it's too late, "You shouldn't have deleted it, if you still wanted it. No, I can't easily get it back for you. You could take the disk to data recovery specialist, but they're going to charge you real money to get the file back. No, I can't just unempty the recycle bin. Do you have backups? You should always keep more than one copy of important files, you know. Backups, yes. On a floppy disk, sure. No, don't *just* keep things on a floppy disk; the whole point of a backup is that you have two copies, such as one on the hard drive and one on the floppy disk. Yes, your computer does have a hard drive. It's inside the case. Don't worry about where it is, just keep a copy in the My Documents folder, plus another copy on a removable disk. Yes, a floppy is a removable disk. No, if you make backups now, it won't get your file back. Please, never delete anything again. No, don't delete. If you want it out of your way for a minute, just move it to a different folder. You know, a folder. You can have as many folders as you want. Just right-click and choose New Folder and type a name for the folder. You can name it anything you want... Yes, you can... no, wait, DO NOT delete folders. Ever. No. They might have files in them you want. If it's in the way, just move it out of the way. Move it to a different folder if you want. Here, look, make a folder called Junk, and anything you want to get out of the way, put it there. Then if you need it back again, you can go into Junk and get it out..."
*Aaargh*
> > you apply cryptanalysis, using the sorts of techniques discussed
> > in cryptography and cryptanalysis books.
> Or, alternately, you [...] coerce^h^h^h^h^hconvince the subject
> to give up the "secret password".
Cryptanalysts call this "rubber hose cryptanalysis" if you coerce, or "social engineering" if you convince by more subversive and less painful means.
> Or, even less sinister, turn the subject's keyboard over, because the
> damn "secret password" is Post-It (tm) noted there.
This is a form of cryptanalysis by surveillance. Any cryptanalysis book that does not at least mention these methods is not worth the paper it's printed on.
> And from a retention point of view, I don't know if you _want_ whatever
> scumbag lawyer is subpoenaeing documents from you to be able to demand
> that you write him a converter. I'd rather be able to say "Here are our
> VisiCalc files. Enjoy!"
No, no, you can do better than that...
"Okay, these tapes contain the information you requested. These other tapes contain the in-house software that reads and writes the format that the data is in on the tapes. Now, _these_ tapes contain the in-house software that reads and writes the tapes. It all runs on TOPS-10. Enjoy! Hmmm... TOPS-10? Oh, we no longer have that, our site license ran out. You'll have to ask DEC."
> if you can get your hands on early versions of ClarisWorks
// series, and second, the Apple // series had and has an unnaturally large hobbyist community, which makes it quite a lot easier to find accurate information, obtain old versions, and so forth.
If you can get your hands on early versions of ClarisWorks, they won't run on any modern system. This is *exactly* the sort of difficulty the original question was talking about. Today, if you had ancient files and needed early versions of ClarisWorks to open them, you could probably solve the problem with a few hours of hunting around on eBay for an old 68k Mac, but with every passing year this will become more and more problematic.
Ancient AppleWorks file formats are not the best example, though, for a couple of reasons. First, AppleWorks was *the* application (not just *the* word processor, but *the* application, period) for the Apple
There are much better examples of formats from about the same era that were, at the time, very popular, but today are virtually impossible to open. RapidFile springs immediately to mind. PC Write. Perhaps scarrier are the formats used by ancient backup software, such as PC Backup. Your documents could have been in a format we can still open, plain ASCII text even, and yet you could be unable to retrieve them *even* if the media are still good (which is another rather scary thing...), if the backup software's backup format is obscure.
I'm curious how easy it is to open really old Lotus 123 spreadsheets with today's spreadsheet software.
> Do you find there's a conceptual difficulty with GMail, or are you
;-) It's enough to say that the above is just a scattered sampling of a *handful* of the features a serious mail client has.
> simply unwilling to learn its system?
I find there is a lack of adequate features for handling large volumes of mail, as is the case, frankly, with any webmail system and most minimalist and end-user-oriented mail clients in general.
The filtering system, for instance, does not support regular expressions, does not support nested boolean logic, does not support flow control, cannot filter based on arbitrary headers, and has a very limited range of actions that it can take. I could go on and on about the limitations of the filtering system. It can autoforward, for instance, but it cannot automatically construct and send a reply. It can attach a label, which is nice, but the label won't cause the message to be highlighted with a different color in the message list like it would in e.g. Pegasus Mail. It cannot add the address from the From field to a mailing list, distribution list, or address book (I don't mean a general address book of all addresses you've got mail from, but one that contains only addresses from messages that trip the filter). A Gmail filter cannot strip out attachments and cannot strip out HTML and show the message as plain text. It can star the message, but there's no additional granularity of score marking.
Speaking of scoring, there is no adaptive scoring mechanism in Gmail at all. There is also no group customisation mechanism, so mailing lists are a pain. Gmail doesn't handle showing/hiding quoted portions as well as Gnus, can't correctly rewrap quoted text at all, doesn't support all three types of forwarding (inline, as attachment, and redirect without edit), and doesn't separately report numbers of read, unread, and starred messages in each folder when looking at the list of folders. What is shown in the list of folders, or in the list of messages, is not customiseable. Also the folders cannot be organized into a hierarchy of topics or prioritized with importance levels.
If I list any more things Gmail doesn't do, I risk turning this reply into a rant. I wouldn't want to do that
Don't get me wrong, Gmail is a lot better than Yahoo Mail and its ilk, but it's still not in anything like the same category as Pegasus Mail or Gnus, *especially* if you have to handle a lot of mail.
> > Does anybody remember what the world was like before Google?
> YES I do remember you noob.
Yeah, me too.
> Google is nothing new, before them there were a few engines that did
> the job fine.
In 1995 they did, but by 1998 or thereabouts, things had degenerated rather badly. It got to the point eventually where you could go through three or four *pages* of results looking for the thing you wanted. I had conditioned myself to go straight for the advanced boolean search and construct complex criteria that excluded the dross, required several keywords, and so on, just to find things. There were a number of things wrong with the major search engines right before Google came out: paid results that got mixed in with all the others, but at or near the top, rediculously excessive advertisements (to the tune of 4+ animated banners per results page, *plus* pop-ups), and the SEO people 0wned the top dozen non-paid slots for just about every search.
Then Google came along, and you could get the page you were looking for in the top three results nine times out of ten with just two keywords and no advanced logic -- which is better than web search had ever been, even in the pre-commercial era. (Back then, you could expect relevant results on the first page of ten, but they wouldn't always be at the top of the list.)
It wasn't technology, mostly, that made Google special. Sure, PageRank is nifty technology, but the thing that really sealed the deal was that they put serious effort into cleaning the junk out of the results, something that search engines for the previous couple of years had been mostly trying not to think about and in some cases actively worsening.
> tell me how data forensics deals with [a PGP Disk file]?
First you recover the PGP Disk file, using the sorts of techniques discussed in the book this review covers. Then you apply cryptanalysis, using the sorts of techniques discussed in cryptography and cryptanalysis books.
> Hah, I moved from Bittorent to newsgroups, THAT is what I call progress
You call usenet progress? I moved my filesharing from usenet to gopher, but that was too backward, so I experimented with finger and whois, but ultimately I settled on sending 360K floppy diskettes through the mail. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a big manilla envelope filled with double-sided, double-density 5.25" diskettes.
> Welcome to the 21st century. You might want to read up on [multimedia]
Yeah, right. I remember when people actually believed that multimedia would take over and everyone would be pushing around hundreds of full-length video files on their PCs. That was, what, 1997? Around the same time that the phrase "Information Superhighway" was popular, and everyone was so excited about how much a Zip disk could hold. But you know what? Like a lot of the tech-related predictions made in the 90s, it never materialized.
A few users -- maybe 10% -- got digital cameras, but that's about it. People download music and stuff from the internet, but always in hugely-compressed lossy formats, for bandwidth reasons. (Most consumer-grade digital cameras produce pretty low-quality lossily-compressed images by default, too.) A typical five-year-old end-user home desktop system at this point has a 30-40GB hard drive, of which 3-4GB is used, and the other 90% sits empty. After five years.
It's a little different for power users, but power users can download a third-party deletion app, because they're not afraid to download and install stuff.
It's the clueless people I want to prevent from deleting stuff, because for every three things they delete they're guaranteed to come to me all teary-eyed asking if one of them can be recovered. If I say, "Sorry, but you deleted it", they say, "Yeah, but can't we _un_delete it? I really need it..." If I say, "You could restore it from your last backup", they look at me like I'm Captain Bizzarroid from the planet Uznivoxite and I just asked them to wave their seven tentacles in all seven dimensions.
Heck, if there were a registry to enable the empty-the-trash feature, I guess even that would be okay, as long as it's off by default and very hard to turn on without either using regedit or downloading TweakUI. I just don't want end users finding it by accident.
> A sideways-inserted bank statement
You throw out bank statements? I keep those on file...
> What then is delete? How does a user distinguish between "remove an
> association from the blob of data" vs "remove this blob of data altogether".
> Should the blob automatically delete when you remove all metadata around it?
> If not, how will you find it again? If so, would you really want data
> vanishing just because you removed a keyword?
If I had my way, the user interface would not provide any way to actually delete a file. Nothing good can come from that, and *plenty* of bad comes from it on a *regular* basis. Anyone who has to work with end users knows this is true.
There should be a trash bin they could throw it in, and it should sit there until the drive dies or someone wipes out the filesystem. (Or, if the drive actually runs low on space, and the swap file is not larger than a few gigabytes, the files that had been in the trash the longest could be actually deleted, after prompting the user to check if it's okay. Four nines of end users would never encounter this. If the drive runs low on space due to an enormous swap file, then the process using the largest amount of memory should be terminated, as it's obviously runaway.)
The last time an end-user *needed* to delete a file was in 1996, when the hard drive could only hold about 2GB and it was necessary to free up space. (No, don't even talk about sensitive information. If it's *actually* sensitive, just deleting the file isn't good enough anyway, and you know it.)
Third-party shareware and freeware utilities would spring up for emptying the trash. Which would be fine, because most of the people who delete things they really still want are afraid to download and install anything anyhow.
As far as removing metadata/keywords from a file... that brings up another shortcoming of current systems. If I had my way, we'd all be using filesystems that provide automatic versioning, and the metadata would be versioned as well as the contents of the file itself. So there'd still be a record of what keywords the file _used_ to have. (Yes, an automatic versioning would need an attribute that you could set on a given file or directory to prevent versioning there, which would be important for things like swapfiles and potentially useful for things like logfiles. But normal files should be versioned. It's not like you're going to fill up that 350GB hard drive with word processing documents and PowerPoint presentations, and the really big multimedia files would only have multiple versions if you were editing them, which normal users don't do; the relative few who do video editing or whatever could turn off versioning in certain folders if they see fit.)
> Why does a human have to enter the metadata? Why not let the machine do
> what it can to derive what the file is about, and ask the human whether
> or not it's right? Such a system can be taught to "learn" when it's right
> or wrong, and it'd get better with time.
Have you ever done any AI research? Have you ever *read* about it? Does the phrase "AI-Complete" have any meaning for you?
> Think about the WinFS like Gmail, I really found the Gmail approach
> useful, more if I have thousands of mail.
I disagree. I have a Gmail account, which I use for just a few things; it probably has a few hundred messages in it at this point, which is to say, practically nothing.
I also have a *real* mail account, and I get the mail from that in Gnus, and store it using the nnml backend. I have at this point about 2GB of mail stored that way on my system.
I have greater difficulty using and finding things in the gmail account.
Granted, it took longer to *learn* to use Gnus, but once I got past that initial learning point, it's significantly easier to use on a day-to-day basis. If I had to handle in Gmail all of the mail that I handle from my primary account, I could not do it.
> Some idiot UI designer probably wrote a paper about how Windows users
;-)
> are confused as to where their files are located.
This is, no doubt, true. Try sometime asking an end user where he saved the last file he was working on, or where it's located. The bright ones will say "on the computer", but that's as close as they can pin it down.
Windows has actually improved considerably in this regard over the last ten years. Today under WinXP _very_ few current (as in, released a new version in the last couple of years) applications default to saving documents in the Windows directory, the root directory, or other totally-completely-inane locations, which was standard practice in 1997. Some do still default to saving within the application's install directory, but this, though not ideal, is considerably better and furthermore even this is fading fast now, presumably due to tech support issues that come up when 2% or so of the users are running without admin privs and can't save files in such locations. The My Documents icon on the desktop, which was essentially useless when it was introduced, now actually serves a purpose, and people are starting to get to the point where they can actually *find* their files.
Which, of course, introduces the risk that people will become productive, thus necessetating the move to WinFS, a filesystem based on databases, something people understand even less than hierarchies
> Unlike 'Vista' (I'll always call it longhorn)
.bat files that will run under anything from DOS 5.0 upwards.)
Vista is not Longhorn -- at least, not as Longhorn was envisioned at one time.
Longhorn, it was said, will use WinFS as its native filesystem. (It will include support for fat32, ntfs, fat16, iso9660, and possibly fat12, but these will be "legacy" systems, deprecated, and probably not supported for the main filesystem where the OS is installed, only for additional filesystems, such as on removable drives.) Vista will still use ntfs as its primary native filesystem; although WinFS can be added to it later, that is an add-on.
Longhorn, it was said, will include the new shell, Monad. Vista will not.
Oh, and Longhorn, it was said, will ship in 2004. Vista will not.
Vista is the Windows 98 SE of our time -- it's not the big upcoming release Microsoft has talked about for so long, and it doesn't have the capabilities that the big upcoming release was supposed to have, or in fact any new capabilities, and it's not going to be a compelling upgrade, but it has to come out, because it's just plain been *too long* since the last release and the market can't wait until the real thing is done.
Microsoft's release cycle gets lengthier with each passing year. Nine months after they finally release Vista, they'll be talking about the next big release (not the server version of Longhorn, I mean, but the successor to Longhorn), but you won't see *that* one for a good long while. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they manage to get Vista out the door in 2006 as they currently say they're fixed to do, that means they'll start talking about Blackcomb in 2007, and by 1Q2008 they'll be predicting they can have it out by "next year) (2009), but the earliest you might possibly see it on store shelves is 2012, and frankly 2015 is more likely.
This is actually good news for the OSS community. It means we have a fairly good idea what the Microsoft desktop is going to look like for the next 7-10 years. Sure, there'll be add-ons, WinFS and eventually Monad, but add-ons are add-ons; if you want add-ons on an OSS system you can have Reiser4 today (though I don't know how stable it is yet -- but WinFS hasn't even been officially released, so I guess we're okay there), and Perl6 is likely to beat Monad to market, or in any case there are a number of excellent scripting languages available today; we haven't had to get by with just a bourne shell for quite some time, to say nothing of making do with the likes of cmd.exe. (Yes, there are people who advocate doing everything in old-school sh for the portability, but they're talking about portability in terms of running on fifteen-year-old systems; the Microsoft equivalent would be writing
I guess what I'm saying is that we know what to expect. Microsoft has grown large enough to become fairly predictable. That's good for the competition.
> I bought a cross-cut shredder which reduces to fairly small pieces
> (4 x 22mm). Although it might be possible to have some meaningful
> information remain intact (e.g. a short account number), this is far
> less probable. Even if this happens, as it's not part of a long run of
> text, the context and meaning will be separated (e.g. the account number
> might not be recognised as such), and unless someone *really* knows what
> they're looking for, they'll probably miss it.
Dude, at this level of paranoia, why not also incinerate the pieces and then run the ashes through a blender full of sulfuric acid set to "frappe"? I mean, sure, it's overkill, but you can never have too much overkill, right?
> Aliens are make believe, just like elves and gremlins and eskimos!
No, no, Elves are real; you just don't see them much because they keep to themselves.
> I think it's pretty convenient to go downstairs and walk 100 feet to
> get all the basics that I need, rather than driving.
I think it's pretty convenient to be able to walk to anywhere in town, and get not just the basics but everything I need, rather than driving. I don't own a car, buy gas, pay car insurance, or spend on car repairs. I live two blocks from work, three from the post office, three from the office supply store, four from the hardware store, three blocks in the other direction from the grocery and the discount place... one block from the high school, one block in the other direction from Heise Park, four blocks from the hospital, one block from the dentist... and when I take my dog for a walk, we go out past the edge of town and across fields. It's nice.
I don't *need* to drive anywhere. What I can't buy in Galion, I buy online.
(Most folks in Galion have a car and drive around town all the time, of course, just like everywhere else in the US, but that's a *choice* people make.)
> Not to mention the incredble public funded programs that the City of
> Chicago puts together, like Millenium Park, movies in the park, and
> summerdance
*shrug*. You pay for all that stuff. My taxes are lower. I suppose if I actually cared for stuff like movies in the park or dance programs, I might think it was worth it, but that sort of thing really isn't my cup of tea.
I do wish we could get fluoride in the water, though, and I'm not saying cities have no advantages at all... but man, the traffic, the lines, the noise, the crowds... such horrible inconveniences you have to put up with; I wouldn't like it at all. Then there's the crime. When a car was stolen in Galion a couple months back, it was on the top of the front page of the paper. The car turned up about twenty or thirty miles away a day or two later, and that made the front page too. We don't lock our house door, day or night, whether we're home or away (though, if we didn't have a dog, we might lock it when we're away). You have no idea how convenient it is to live a life without locked doors until you've done it. (Businesses and offices do lock up at night, though; we're a small city, but we're not *that* small. I think 10-12 thousand people or so.) My parents didn't used to lock their cars in the driveway, until they got Fords, which lock themselves automatically, one of the most annoying and inconvenient security features ever devised.
> Of course, this is what human players do to each other too, trying to
> ensure that the other player's models of them are wrong. There's no reason
> a sophisicated bot can't pull the same kind of tricks.
This would be the poker equivalent of what Iocaine Powder did for the old rock, scissors, and paper game. It would be interesting to have an annual competition dedicated to this, where the bots play (for imaginary money, presumably) against one another and/or human players, and award some kind of gold-plated No Prize to the winning bot each year.
> WinHoldEm doesn't try to profile or model players. It just plays perfect
> poker (statistically.)
In other words, it is, in RoShamBo terms, MetaMetaRandom. You can't take huge amounts of money from it, but it's not going to take anyone (well, any real player) for anything significant either.
> And against most players, that is a sure win over time.
It online poker, this is probably true. Most of the people playing online poker would probably lose their shirts if they had to play anyone who's any good.
> Even against great players, it doesn't lose over time
Here is where you're wrong. Great players, even moderately good players, know how to manipulate a predictable opponent. A great player will know, based on the odds, exactly what the stats-bot is going to do, and can take advantage of that.
> the other 95% is comprised of statisical knowledge, human psychology,
> knowing *how* to bet, and the 5% is just a touch of luck/karma/whatever
That's actually a pretty good description of gambling.
> > [Games should be fun -- not business, IMHO.]
> Anything that involves real money is, or becomes, business.
This is why we only play for M&Ms. We assign values to the different colors, and use them as chips. Everybody brings a pack of M&Ms to the game. Eating your profits is explicitely allowed. Somehow, mysteriously, we always seem to run out of our M&M poker chips, and then the game's over. Funny how that works.
I've heard of playing for homemade cookies, as a form of higher-stakes game, but to me it always sounded a bit too much like a way to put on weight.
> You are technically allowed to count cards. They are also technically
> allowed to kick you out of their casino, and technically allowed to
> blacklist you from all the casinos in the state. They don't like it
> when you win.
This is probably the most important thing to understand about gambling: the house doesn't like it when you win. If possible, they will arrange things so you don't win, and failing that, they will ask you to leave.
I'm not talking about a small win here or there, obviously. That's still losing, when you average it in, and they're fine with that. I'm talking about consistent net wins.
When you understand this, you won't gamble with money you don't intend to lose.
> There's no laws against cheating, but then again, there's no laws
> against kicking you out of the casino either.
Counting cards (in your head) isn't cheating. There are ways to cheat in poker, without a bot, even, but that's not one of them. Collusion is one. Stacking the deck is another, harder-to-pull-off way. Marked cards are another. Counting cards is not. All good players keep track of what cards have been played, to at least some extent. (This is true not just in Poker, but in most card games, even non-gambling ones, like euchre or bridge.) Assuming you do it in your head, not with a bot, card counting is just a game skill, the same as reading faces, memorizing tables of odds, or bluffing.
> It could be done in this way, but you'd have to bring in many other aspects
> of music to get there (rhythm, tempo, timbre, range, and (shudder) harmony
> for example).
Forget harmony. Really, forget it. Real music doesn't *need* harmony, because *real* music has counterpoint. Harmony is just a cheap immitation. Music that's really worth listening to has counterpoint.
I am not convinced that a computer could write the really good stuff, but you could try it. It'd be a good hobby / spare time project; as long as you enjoy playing around with it, you haven't lost anything if it doesn't end up working out.