I always tend to find Nielsen to a be a sort of second-rate Tufte. He's usually got a few good points that would seem to be conventional wisdom, but he's actually done or read up on the research, so that's kinda cool. But the Ponderous Voice is incredibly annoying. As is his uncanny ability to fit every design and marketing problem online back into his design philosophy, when it is obvious that the problem domain is significantly different than the one his book addressed. The approach -- always trying to shoehorn every problem into one simplistic framework -- shares a lot with the worst ways of practicing religious faith, but in this case, I'm pretty sure it also stems from a kind of opportunism.
Nielsen has an interesting riff in this very slight interview (couldn't WSJ have expanded the online version of it?) on what to call RSS. It's an excellent point -- lay people don't know "RSS" the way they know "web" or even "Myspace". It is useful technology that could help a good number of people. But between the utter proliferation of newsreaders and naming conventions, it far too fragmented to cement widespread public understanding.
For a guy who loves to throw around numbers, I find Nielsen's comment about blogs incoherent and worthless. Is there evidence that blogs are being designed for the technical elite? What is this "one extreme edge" that bloggers are on? Is there evidence that blogs are corporate marketing tools even are trying to find a broad audience? These are incredibly dubious assertions. Any thoughtful strategy for reaching out to customers is going to combine blogging, email, RSS and other technologies in an audience-specific way. Duh.
Any operating system that is capable of the tasks contemporary computer users want that system to do (being connected to the Internet as the prime example) is one that can be configured to be exploited.
Second, it is empirically accurate to state that no one has complete, a priori knowledge of bugs in a reasonably complex piece of software, some of which could lead to exploit conditions.
Third, is it even theoretically possible to have a priori knowledge of such bugs given a system of sufficient complexity?
Mod this guy up, he knows what he's talking about. I work with Data in the private sector and data like this cannot be on an unprotected machine.
People (not you, necessarily) in this thread have immediately jumped on a public/private sector distinction. But I don't think that's so much the cause of variance. Instead, security, finally, varies by resource allocation. If a body, public or private, puts the right resources and personnel towards security, then things will be better. If they don't, things will be worse. Ultimately, if higher-ups won't allocate the resources, this is going to happen. For better and for worse, actual regulation, via Sarbanes-Oxley, is imposed for the private sector.
It is absolutely amazing to me that this event was even possible.
Actually, it isn't that amazing at all. I'm wrapping up a sysadmin gig in the nonprofit world (and moving back to strictly commercial work) right now. Specifically, I'm in legal services, where the IT talent is very thin but some of the privacy and security needs are pretty serious. I can tell you, I know of three legal services organizations or programs in the US that practice anything resembling defense-in-depth. That's why a lot of recent attacks (like the rise of "spear-phishing") use social engineering to get in. Because once you're inside the walls, so to speak, far too many networks are open season that really shouldn't be.
If you're throwing around passwords in the clear or unecrypted files or have network shares with sensitive information and broad access on the local network, the risk is there because there's always a door to the inside in our pervasive-Internet world. In many cases, that door is through human nature/sociological probability/whatever you want to call it.
A sysadmin must absolutely assume that there will be a user that is going to pull this kind of stupid crap, and design their defenses around it. But, speaking from experience, go to a big ol' local nonprofit that has lots of sensitive client information and start grilling the sysadmins about defense-in-depth and see what they say. You think they're monitoring all local network segments for malicious traffic with Snort? Encrypting local traffic and keeping a tight lock on any shared resources? Have a containment strategy if they detect an intrusion? Have clear and enforceable policies with respect to data retention or user activity? You'll definitely find folks are running Symantec Enterprise and have a badass firewall, etc, and that's cool, but it just isn't enough.
Shoot, this isn't local security, but nonetheless some major ASPs that handle donations for nonprofits provide the option of sending credit cards numbers in the clear. Sure, you're looking at a secure page, but some script is actually doing the real POST over straight http, and you never see it.
Defense-in-depth is going to become more and more critical for everybody, especially small and medium sized businesses that have been marketed elaborate and powerful perimeter defenses and anti-virus companies have hawked products that day-by-day become increasingly irrelevant to the real security threats, which must rely on tightening local security measures and doing actual traffic analysis of the network itself, not just watching for compromises on the client, because those compromises are going to be harder and harder to detect as the compromises become more and more social in nature and frankly, only good for post-mortem analysis, after the catastrophe has already hit.
A final thought: Elaine Scarry, a philosopher, is writing a book on the meaning of consent in a world where nuclear war is a possibility. I think one could ask some questions about the meaning of technological freedom in a world where a lot of greedy, malicious people are out to clobber any and all security weaknesses on computing machines that store and transmit incredibly sensitive information.
Forgive my neo-Ludditism, but why does a cell phone have to be more than a phone?
Okay, we should agree that the design-speak in saying "[T]he handset is designed to sit as a picture frame wherever the user is, serving the dual purpose of communications device and a comforting familiar focal point; at home, at work or in a hotel while away on business" is quite thick. But some part of the concept here is that the cell phone can be in some way "less" than a phone in that you can integrate it comfortably into a human environment. IMHO, too many gadgets advertise themselves too much (the extreme being gamer PC cases). In fact, really effective casemods make the PC look like something else -- less like a self-advertising gadget and more like something that fits the aesthetics of the space better. It seems like this design has this goal, and to that end, I think it's pretty admirable.
On the other hand, even as an admirable goal, the phone looks like your standard bland cell phone. As often happens with academic exercises, theory trumps praxis in this case.
There isn't a business advantage to this sort of secrecy because your competitors can easily obtain this same information through a blind. So it comes down to policy motivated by irrational fear & greed. Who needs to really deal with company with these qualities?
IANAL, and though I work with a lot of lawyers, I know very little about export law except what I know from/., etc. But it would seem that one possibility is that the policy is in fact motivated by rational fear and "greed". Hifn isn't exactly an MS or Intel sized business. They're not a tiny company, but remember that lawyers cost a crapload of cash. Perhaps Hifn has simply decided that it is most economically feasible to be a little over-cautious so as not to run afoul of export law. Those datasheets -- do they necessarily count as exports? I don't know, and it seems to be an underrated element of the debate here, but could Hifn afford a challenge in court from the DoJ, even if the ultimate ruling is favorable to Hifn? There's a difference between "turning a profit" and "fuck you" money, like what IBM might have. Theo's comment about Hifn being OpenBSD's customer with respect to drivers doesn't help any, because it implies that Hifn's datasheets allow OpenBSD to create a product that they could, uh, export.
As is often the case, Theo may have a fundamentally correct conclusion to his argument, but the way he reaches that conclusion will likely do nothing to get Hifn to change their practices. Were I in their position, working in an industry that is closely monitored and with signficant legal risks, I'd become more paranoid.
Re:Author is a little misinformed
on
It's No Game At Apple
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm absolutely positive that Apple would LOVE to be known as a serious gaming company. Gamers spend BIG BUCKS on their hardware. Maybe now that Apple is selling x86 boxes you'll start to see more emphasis from Apple on gaming hardware, for those gamers that want to dual-boot, but it will never be a primary market for them unless Apple dumps OS X altogether (which ain't happenin).
The article itself is pretty silly, but... while I agree Apple probably would love to be a serious gaming company, Apple, unlike MS, is pretty disciplined overall about their limitations and core competencies. When they've strayed from these, things have gone even more disastrously for the company than it has for MS. In general, their hardware and their OS has more polish and care than most anything in the x86/Windows world. Given Jobs at the helm, it is doubtful that Apple will make a serious run at gaming (just as they haven't taken a serious run at business desktops in many a moon) unless they are convinced that they can do it with the same level of care and sophistication that makes the iPod such a successful consumer product.
More in the realm of conjecture, I'd think that if Apple were to make a serious run at gaming, they'd be approaching it from the same angle as Nintendo with the Gameboy DS and the Wii -- angling for interface and gameplay innovations that open up new markets in the gaming world, just like iMovie is a very popular and successful tool for many people who would've blanched at the thought of digital movie editing a few years ago and the iPod broke past the nerdiness factor associated with portable digital audio players.
I got HL2 Episode 1 today, and I think it is quite inspired for this reason. Absolute max with a game for me is an hour once or twice a week if I'm lucky. Judging from the hour I put in today, Episode One is extremely polished, immersive, and it doesn't overreach, which lets the devs get all kinds of tiny little things right. And, happily, it won't take me 6 months to play through with my current schedule. I'd much rather play one excellent, short game every three or four months than spend all my free time just to complete a damn game. I loved Planescape Torment but I played that one for the better part of a year.
Another good game if you like interactive fiction is Phototopia. It plays through in under two hours and is deeply moving and artful -- like Planescape and Grim Fandango, it is art. Game developers and designers want more stuff in their games -- more explosions, longer sequences, etc. I want something that will be thought-provoking, moving, and not take over my life to have those experiences.
So, I have one of those Shuttle small form factor cases. Very good experience overall, except one very bad run-in with their support. Quiet and austere enough that even my girlfriend was into it. But, here's the kicker...
LEDs on the front of the case
...my Shuttle has a setting for LED brightness in the BIOS, from 100% of max to off. Whoever was kind enough to put that in there, I salute them. I want a computer that I can ignore when I want to use my desk for something so pedestrian as reading or writing.
The case is about a California state law, so it's probably not that useful in Chicago. (But it's still a good thing, of course.)
Agreed. The lawsuit that we reported on (an alleged series of incidents of grace police misconduct) is actually a federal civil rights suit. But, even though a California court doesn't set jurisprudential precedent at the federal level, certainly such cases do have an impact on the way judges think about these issues.
[W]e can see no sustainable basis to distinguish petitioners from the reporters, editors, and publishers who provide news to the public through traditional print and broadcast media. It is established without contradiction that they gather, select, and prepare, for purposes of publication to a mass audience, information about current events of interest and concern to that audience." "If their activities and social function differ at all from those of traditional print and broadcast journalists, the distinctions are minute, subtle, and constitutionally immaterial.
Essentially, the sum total results of this decision were that someone acting in a journalistic capacity qualifies as a journalist, without further refining the definition thereof. Whoop-de-freaking-doo.
But isn't that exactly how shield laws should work? Is a blogger a journalist? If they're gathering or distributing news. Is a NY Times writer a journalist? If they're gathering or distributing news. Why should a reporter for the mainstream media automatically get subpoena immunity in discovery via a shield law while a blogger can't? Seems obvious, but being the midst of one of these and following the others closely, the public and legal discourse definitely needs more analysis along these lines.
The cool thing here is that the decision makes significant progress on the definition of "news" and extends it to include source material published. From the decision:
[A]n absence of editorial judgment cannot be inferred merely from the fact that some source material is published verbatim. It may once have been unusual to reproduce source materials at length, but that fact appears attributable to the constraints of pre-digital publishing technology, which compelled an editor to decide how to use the limited space afforded by a particular publication. This required decisions not only about what information to include but about how to compress source materials to fit. In short, editors were forced to summarize, paraphrase, and rewrite because there was not room on their pages to do otherwise.
Digital communication and storage, especially when coupled with hypertext linking, make it possible to present readers with an unlimited amount of information in connection with a given subject, story, or report. The only real constraint now is time-the publisher's and the reader's. From the reader's perspective, the ideal presentation probably consists of a top-level summary with the ability to 'drill down' to source materials through hypertext links. The decision whether to take this approach, or to present original information at the top level of an article, is itself an occasion for editorial judgment. Courts ought not to cling too fiercely to traditional preconceptions, especially when they may operate to discourage the seemingly salutary practice of providing readers with source materials rather than subjecting them to the editors' own 'spin' on a story.
This is a pretty significant finding by the court that displays a keen understanding of "editorial oversight" and a creative and wise interpretation of how such oversight applies to online publications.
Given all the crazy things that could've happened, this is really good.
Basically, the court afforded bloggers the same protections under the law that are given to all journalists, including shield laws.
Actually, the court said that they didn't want to rule on what qualifies a person as a "journalist" but would rather focus on the activity. That's a quite sane and reasonable approach.
I'm currently in the midst of a case where the city of Chicago is aggressively pursuing a subpoena of a writer I work with for our online reporting on police misconduct in conjuction with a federal civil rights lawsuit (see The View From The Ground). One of the questions in these cases always centers on whether or not the writer is "really" a journalist. This court sets a useful precedent in arguing that the spirit of shield laws is intended to protect the activity of making and distributing "news" and not "journalists" per se. Of course, there's no federal shield law, so our situation is different.
Following the court's logic in this case, you have to wonder how much "journalism" (as in material that appears in newspapers, magazines, etc) is protected by shield laws.
I largely agree with you, but as usual, it just depends and that's part of the power of free software. I don't need Nagios and its crazy configuration to do my monitoring, so I use monit and munin much as described here and it worked without any significant configuration and did what I wanted. Very nice. But some people do need something as complex as Nagios. And there you go -- there are multiple projects that fill different niches. Sure, there are people who will be elitist about such things, but screw 'em if they can't take a joke (or be pragmatic). Use the right tool. But remember that in a monoculture, there's typically only one tool -- and that's far worse the the "zealots".
Not that photographs are going to be that helpful, but the photos in the sarajevo-x thread posted in the comments somewhere showed a hill that looked more or less conical to me, with a broad sloping flat side that in the images they'd super-imposed an overlay of steps.
Kind of amazing to realize how much skillful PR matters in getting media attention. Dude found a pointy hill and is calling it a pyramid, but he knows how to get reporters interested. It probably doesn't help that Americans love all that new-age Atlantis Secrets of the Pyramids BS.
A question for whoever knows. I don't know anything about geology, but I do know physics. How probable is the formation of pointy hill from geological perspective? I wouldn't suspect they are a geologocial impossibility but would need a couple of fortuitous conditions to form instead of the usual rounded hill, like a radial mudslide at the top or a pointy rock formation beneath the soil near the top -- something that would change the typical pattern of erosion. I'd wager there are even technical terms for pointy hills and round hills.
At FreeGeek Chicago (shameless link alert), we've been using the Xubuntu desktop on systems as low as Pentium II 400s. The project has been moving more and more towards being very close in look and feel to the default Gnome-based Ubuntu distro, but it runs pretty well on quite limited hardware. You don't have wonderful load times for GTK heavy apps, like FF, but the system is quite snappy -- it certainly feels lighter and more responsive than Win XP on the same hardware, and that's without spyware/malware/crapware infestation.
OTOH -- Gnome and KDE based distros definitely do not breathe new life into old hardware these days.
What's next? A hysterical report about how (gasp!) a root server could be compromised and we'd all be hosed? Duh! Talk about stating the obvious.
It really isn't the same at all. You sort of hope/expect a root server to be very closely monitoring and controlled by a professional team, but once you start adding multiple links in the chain of varying security and on top of that throw in broken DNS resolvers (like the ones SBC/AT&T use that only cache one nameserver for a given domain... even if the nameservice provider has redundancy, you won't benefit from it if the cached nameserver gets hosed).
DNS is a system in which each failure of any individual in the pyramid has the same ability to hose access to your site, but differential security and quality of service. That's not ideal at all.
To back this thesis up, there have been several major DNS outages (joker.com and Worldnic both bit me in the ass, and there were reports on SANS of others), some due to malicious activity, some due to other problems, in the past few months that have made life insane for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of site operators. The system is way too fragile, IMHO.
Though very rarely, strange shit like this happens. I had a friend brought home his clothes from the laundromat compressed together in big bags. The clothes (particularly the metal pieces) were hot enough from the drying that they set fire to the bags, which should have burned out but set fire to some paper, which resulted in his apartment slowly catching fire. The resultant fire and (mainly) smoke damage, his lack of insurance, and his slum-lord renter meant his family almost wound up homeless. Shit happens, but weird shit happens, too.
Office has MUCH better version tracking, sharing and collaborative features.
This is exactly right, and from my perch as a sysadmin for legal services and advocacy organization as well as a side gig working with a journalist, you're not going to see any OOo uptake in those sectors until version tracking is a) better and b) more compatible with Word. Word's featureset there is so useful that it doesn't matter what other crap it comes with or without. Worse for OOo, the state of Illinois requires that contributors on legislation use Word's version tracking.
OTOH, I haven't found an easy "destroy changes" method... which is bad news for sensitive legal documents, so we have been training our staff to send out PDFs except when necessary to attach the Word file.
David
One can only meet so many atheistic Jews, pope-denouncing Catholics, pork-eating Muslims, and meat-eating Buddhists before realizing that every theist on this planet is probably practicing his or her own religion.
This is way off-topic, yes, but... yes, that's exactly it. Shoot, my mom's idea of God is not my dad's idea of God -- and they claim to believe in the same deity. Of course it gets even worse: Mormons say they're Christians, but a lot of Christians say they aren't. Several of my profs (I went to a religious school) claimed to be "Christian" but they didn't believe in a literal resurrection of Christ, which lots of people at the school then said disqualified them from being Christians.
I dunno what makes a Christian a Christian or a Muslim a Muslim except that they chose that label. And nobody else does, either. This is empirically supportable, as there is no logical argument that can decide such a definitional debate and further, these definitional arguments are all-too-common in our era and in every other historical era that I've studied. Certainly, humans may have Pascal's "God-shaped hole" in their consciousness somewhere, but it takes exactly three minutes of talking to folks at the neighborhood church/mosque/synagogue to realize that people fill that God shaped hole with the widest possible variety of shapes.
What it comes down to, which is exactly what adherents of organized religion are trying their damnedest to avoid, is that there isn't an ultimate definition or ultimate judge of what constitutes a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist...which is exactly what organized religion is trying to provide in the first place.
What's of more practical interest is that despite these wild differences within communities of faith, politicians of all stripes cynically exploit the unified label and the thinnest forms of common opinion regarding issues of minor social relevance in the big picture to construct and sustain their own power. What Karl Rove and company are doing is not that different from tThe consolidation of hundreds of regional and local religions in Indian by native elites in concert with their imperial British masters into "Hindu" in order to shore up power in the hands of the Brits and their allies. Rove is only slightly more subtle. Other techniques for achieving solidarity and mobilizing others into action on the behalf of power exist, but Bin Laden, Rove et al testify to the efficacy of using religion to do this.
Sounds more like video games, as they can be very addictive, but I don't ever recall lying awake at night, with the shakes, because it's been 36 hours since my last hit of Excel.
On the other hand, only software companies and drug dealers call their customers and clients users.
Technology itself is neutral and can be used for both good and evil purposes. Perhaps, what I'd like to see would be a citizen's oversight group that can provide the checks on government abuse of the network.
I've said it before I'll say it again, even if it is a little off-topic. Technology is not neutral. It has shaped our brains themselves at least since our ancestors started making stone tools and decisively affected the course of language development.
Nobody's sure how pervasive high speed Internet access is changing our lives and our cognition (though people are researching this) but it is simply wrong to assert that the technology is neutral and that only the way it is used and the economic arrangements surrounding it that have an ethical slant. By expanding the world of human action and thought in certain ways but limiting it in the others, technology is never morally or politically neutral.
Slashdot Mirror
I always tend to find Nielsen to a be a sort of second-rate Tufte. He's usually got a few good points that would seem to be conventional wisdom, but he's actually done or read up on the research, so that's kinda cool. But the Ponderous Voice is incredibly annoying. As is his uncanny ability to fit every design and marketing problem online back into his design philosophy, when it is obvious that the problem domain is significantly different than the one his book addressed. The approach -- always trying to shoehorn every problem into one simplistic framework -- shares a lot with the worst ways of practicing religious faith, but in this case, I'm pretty sure it also stems from a kind of opportunism.
Nielsen has an interesting riff in this very slight interview (couldn't WSJ have expanded the online version of it?) on what to call RSS. It's an excellent point -- lay people don't know "RSS" the way they know "web" or even "Myspace". It is useful technology that could help a good number of people. But between the utter proliferation of newsreaders and naming conventions, it far too fragmented to cement widespread public understanding.
For a guy who loves to throw around numbers, I find Nielsen's comment about blogs incoherent and worthless. Is there evidence that blogs are being designed for the technical elite? What is this "one extreme edge" that bloggers are on? Is there evidence that blogs are corporate marketing tools even are trying to find a broad audience? These are incredibly dubious assertions. Any thoughtful strategy for reaching out to customers is going to combine blogging, email, RSS and other technologies in an audience-specific way. Duh.
Any operating system that is capable of the tasks contemporary computer users want that system to do (being connected to the Internet as the prime example) is one that can be configured to be exploited.
Second, it is empirically accurate to state that no one has complete, a priori knowledge of bugs in a reasonably complex piece of software, some of which could lead to exploit conditions.
Third, is it even theoretically possible to have a priori knowledge of such bugs given a system of sufficient complexity?
People (not you, necessarily) in this thread have immediately jumped on a public/private sector distinction. But I don't think that's so much the cause of variance. Instead, security, finally, varies by resource allocation. If a body, public or private, puts the right resources and personnel towards security, then things will be better. If they don't, things will be worse. Ultimately, if higher-ups won't allocate the resources, this is going to happen. For better and for worse, actual regulation, via Sarbanes-Oxley, is imposed for the private sector.
Actually, it isn't that amazing at all. I'm wrapping up a sysadmin gig in the nonprofit world (and moving back to strictly commercial work) right now. Specifically, I'm in legal services, where the IT talent is very thin but some of the privacy and security needs are pretty serious. I can tell you, I know of three legal services organizations or programs in the US that practice anything resembling defense-in-depth. That's why a lot of recent attacks (like the rise of "spear-phishing") use social engineering to get in. Because once you're inside the walls, so to speak, far too many networks are open season that really shouldn't be.
If you're throwing around passwords in the clear or unecrypted files or have network shares with sensitive information and broad access on the local network, the risk is there because there's always a door to the inside in our pervasive-Internet world. In many cases, that door is through human nature/sociological probability/whatever you want to call it.
A sysadmin must absolutely assume that there will be a user that is going to pull this kind of stupid crap, and design their defenses around it. But, speaking from experience, go to a big ol' local nonprofit that has lots of sensitive client information and start grilling the sysadmins about defense-in-depth and see what they say. You think they're monitoring all local network segments for malicious traffic with Snort? Encrypting local traffic and keeping a tight lock on any shared resources? Have a containment strategy if they detect an intrusion? Have clear and enforceable policies with respect to data retention or user activity? You'll definitely find folks are running Symantec Enterprise and have a badass firewall, etc, and that's cool, but it just isn't enough.
Shoot, this isn't local security, but nonetheless some major ASPs that handle donations for nonprofits provide the option of sending credit cards numbers in the clear. Sure, you're looking at a secure page, but some script is actually doing the real POST over straight http, and you never see it.
Defense-in-depth is going to become more and more critical for everybody, especially small and medium sized businesses that have been marketed elaborate and powerful perimeter defenses and anti-virus companies have hawked products that day-by-day become increasingly irrelevant to the real security threats, which must rely on tightening local security measures and doing actual traffic analysis of the network itself, not just watching for compromises on the client, because those compromises are going to be harder and harder to detect as the compromises become more and more social in nature and frankly, only good for post-mortem analysis, after the catastrophe has already hit.
A final thought: Elaine Scarry, a philosopher, is writing a book on the meaning of consent in a world where nuclear war is a possibility. I think one could ask some questions about the meaning of technological freedom in a world where a lot of greedy, malicious people are out to clobber any and all security weaknesses on computing machines that store and transmit incredibly sensitive information.
Okay, we should agree that the design-speak in saying "[T]he handset is designed to sit as a picture frame wherever the user is, serving the dual purpose of communications device and a comforting familiar focal point; at home, at work or in a hotel while away on business" is quite thick. But some part of the concept here is that the cell phone can be in some way "less" than a phone in that you can integrate it comfortably into a human environment. IMHO, too many gadgets advertise themselves too much (the extreme being gamer PC cases). In fact, really effective casemods make the PC look like something else -- less like a self-advertising gadget and more like something that fits the aesthetics of the space better. It seems like this design has this goal, and to that end, I think it's pretty admirable.
On the other hand, even as an admirable goal, the phone looks like your standard bland cell phone. As often happens with academic exercises, theory trumps praxis in this case.
IANAL, and though I work with a lot of lawyers, I know very little about export law except what I know from /., etc. But it would seem that one possibility is that the policy is in fact motivated by rational fear and "greed". Hifn isn't exactly an MS or Intel sized business. They're not a tiny company, but remember that lawyers cost a crapload of cash. Perhaps Hifn has simply decided that it is most economically feasible to be a little over-cautious so as not to run afoul of export law. Those datasheets -- do they necessarily count as exports? I don't know, and it seems to be an underrated element of the debate here, but could Hifn afford a challenge in court from the DoJ, even if the ultimate ruling is favorable to Hifn? There's a difference between "turning a profit" and "fuck you" money, like what IBM might have. Theo's comment about Hifn being OpenBSD's customer with respect to drivers doesn't help any, because it implies that Hifn's datasheets allow OpenBSD to create a product that they could, uh, export.
As is often the case, Theo may have a fundamentally correct conclusion to his argument, but the way he reaches that conclusion will likely do nothing to get Hifn to change their practices. Were I in their position, working in an industry that is closely monitored and with signficant legal risks, I'd become more paranoid.
The article itself is pretty silly, but... while I agree Apple probably would love to be a serious gaming company, Apple, unlike MS, is pretty disciplined overall about their limitations and core competencies. When they've strayed from these, things have gone even more disastrously for the company than it has for MS. In general, their hardware and their OS has more polish and care than most anything in the x86/Windows world. Given Jobs at the helm, it is doubtful that Apple will make a serious run at gaming (just as they haven't taken a serious run at business desktops in many a moon) unless they are convinced that they can do it with the same level of care and sophistication that makes the iPod such a successful consumer product.
More in the realm of conjecture, I'd think that if Apple were to make a serious run at gaming, they'd be approaching it from the same angle as Nintendo with the Gameboy DS and the Wii -- angling for interface and gameplay innovations that open up new markets in the gaming world, just like iMovie is a very popular and successful tool for many people who would've blanched at the thought of digital movie editing a few years ago and the iPod broke past the nerdiness factor associated with portable digital audio players.
I got HL2 Episode 1 today, and I think it is quite inspired for this reason. Absolute max with a game for me is an hour once or twice a week if I'm lucky. Judging from the hour I put in today, Episode One is extremely polished, immersive, and it doesn't overreach, which lets the devs get all kinds of tiny little things right. And, happily, it won't take me 6 months to play through with my current schedule. I'd much rather play one excellent, short game every three or four months than spend all my free time just to complete a damn game. I loved Planescape Torment but I played that one for the better part of a year.
Another good game if you like interactive fiction is Phototopia. It plays through in under two hours and is deeply moving and artful -- like Planescape and Grim Fandango, it is art. Game developers and designers want more stuff in their games -- more explosions, longer sequences, etc. I want something that will be thought-provoking, moving, and not take over my life to have those experiences.
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The View From The Ground : Internet citizen journalism from the inner city
So, I have one of those Shuttle small form factor cases. Very good experience overall, except one very bad run-in with their support. Quiet and austere enough that even my girlfriend was into it. But, here's the kicker...
...my Shuttle has a setting for LED brightness in the BIOS, from 100% of max to off. Whoever was kind enough to put that in there, I salute them. I want a computer that I can ignore when I want to use my desk for something so pedestrian as reading or writing.
Agreed. The lawsuit that we reported on (an alleged series of incidents of grace police misconduct) is actually a federal civil rights suit. But, even though a California court doesn't set jurisprudential precedent at the federal level, certainly such cases do have an impact on the way judges think about these issues.
Actually, check out the decision:
But isn't that exactly how shield laws should work? Is a blogger a journalist? If they're gathering or distributing news. Is a NY Times writer a journalist? If they're gathering or distributing news. Why should a reporter for the mainstream media automatically get subpoena immunity in discovery via a shield law while a blogger can't? Seems obvious, but being the midst of one of these and following the others closely, the public and legal discourse definitely needs more analysis along these lines.
The cool thing here is that the decision makes significant progress on the definition of "news" and extends it to include source material published. From the decision:
This is a pretty significant finding by the court that displays a keen understanding of "editorial oversight" and a creative and wise interpretation of how such oversight applies to online publications.
Given all the crazy things that could've happened, this is really good.
Actually, the court said that they didn't want to rule on what qualifies a person as a "journalist" but would rather focus on the activity. That's a quite sane and reasonable approach.
I'm currently in the midst of a case where the city of Chicago is aggressively pursuing a subpoena of a writer I work with for our online reporting on police misconduct in conjuction with a federal civil rights lawsuit (see The View From The Ground). One of the questions in these cases always centers on whether or not the writer is "really" a journalist. This court sets a useful precedent in arguing that the spirit of shield laws is intended to protect the activity of making and distributing "news" and not "journalists" per se. Of course, there's no federal shield law, so our situation is different.
Following the court's logic in this case, you have to wonder how much "journalism" (as in material that appears in newspapers, magazines, etc) is protected by shield laws.
I largely agree with you, but as usual, it just depends and that's part of the power of free software. I don't need Nagios and its crazy configuration to do my monitoring, so I use monit and munin much as described here and it worked without any significant configuration and did what I wanted. Very nice. But some people do need something as complex as Nagios. And there you go -- there are multiple projects that fill different niches. Sure, there are people who will be elitist about such things, but screw 'em if they can't take a joke (or be pragmatic). Use the right tool. But remember that in a monoculture, there's typically only one tool -- and that's far worse the the "zealots".
Not that photographs are going to be that helpful, but the photos in the sarajevo-x thread posted in the comments somewhere showed a hill that looked more or less conical to me, with a broad sloping flat side that in the images they'd super-imposed an overlay of steps.
Kind of amazing to realize how much skillful PR matters in getting media attention. Dude found a pointy hill and is calling it a pyramid, but he knows how to get reporters interested. It probably doesn't help that Americans love all that new-age Atlantis Secrets of the Pyramids BS.
A question for whoever knows. I don't know anything about geology, but I do know physics. How probable is the formation of pointy hill from geological perspective? I wouldn't suspect they are a geologocial impossibility but would need a couple of fortuitous conditions to form instead of the usual rounded hill, like a radial mudslide at the top or a pointy rock formation beneath the soil near the top -- something that would change the typical pattern of erosion. I'd wager there are even technical terms for pointy hills and round hills.
At FreeGeek Chicago (shameless link alert), we've been using the Xubuntu desktop on systems as low as Pentium II 400s. The project has been moving more and more towards being very close in look and feel to the default Gnome-based Ubuntu distro, but it runs pretty well on quite limited hardware. You don't have wonderful load times for GTK heavy apps, like FF, but the system is quite snappy -- it certainly feels lighter and more responsive than Win XP on the same hardware, and that's without spyware/malware/crapware infestation.
OTOH -- Gnome and KDE based distros definitely do not breathe new life into old hardware these days.
It really isn't the same at all. You sort of hope/expect a root server to be very closely monitoring and controlled by a professional team, but once you start adding multiple links in the chain of varying security and on top of that throw in broken DNS resolvers (like the ones SBC/AT&T use that only cache one nameserver for a given domain... even if the nameservice provider has redundancy, you won't benefit from it if the cached nameserver gets hosed).
DNS is a system in which each failure of any individual in the pyramid has the same ability to hose access to your site, but differential security and quality of service. That's not ideal at all.
To back this thesis up, there have been several major DNS outages (joker.com and Worldnic both bit me in the ass, and there were reports on SANS of others), some due to malicious activity, some due to other problems, in the past few months that have made life insane for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of site operators. The system is way too fragile, IMHO.
Though very rarely, strange shit like this happens. I had a friend brought home his clothes from the laundromat compressed together in big bags. The clothes (particularly the metal pieces) were hot enough from the drying that they set fire to the bags, which should have burned out but set fire to some paper, which resulted in his apartment slowly catching fire. The resultant fire and (mainly) smoke damage, his lack of insurance, and his slum-lord renter meant his family almost wound up homeless. Shit happens, but weird shit happens, too.
"Sri Lanki Declares Open Source Weak." Open source isn't weak, you insenstive Sri Lankan clods... Oh wait, where did I put my glasses?
This is way off-topic, yes, but... yes, that's exactly it. Shoot, my mom's idea of God is not my dad's idea of God -- and they claim to believe in the same deity. Of course it gets even worse: Mormons say they're Christians, but a lot of Christians say they aren't. Several of my profs (I went to a religious school) claimed to be "Christian" but they didn't believe in a literal resurrection of Christ, which lots of people at the school then said disqualified them from being Christians.
I dunno what makes a Christian a Christian or a Muslim a Muslim except that they chose that label. And nobody else does, either. This is empirically supportable, as there is no logical argument that can decide such a definitional debate and further, these definitional arguments are all-too-common in our era and in every other historical era that I've studied. Certainly, humans may have Pascal's "God-shaped hole" in their consciousness somewhere, but it takes exactly three minutes of talking to folks at the neighborhood church/mosque/synagogue to realize that people fill that God shaped hole with the widest possible variety of shapes.
What it comes down to, which is exactly what adherents of organized religion are trying their damnedest to avoid, is that there isn't an ultimate definition or ultimate judge of what constitutes a Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist...which is exactly what organized religion is trying to provide in the first place.
What's of more practical interest is that despite these wild differences within communities of faith, politicians of all stripes cynically exploit the unified label and the thinnest forms of common opinion regarding issues of minor social relevance in the big picture to construct and sustain their own power. What Karl Rove and company are doing is not that different from tThe consolidation of hundreds of regional and local religions in Indian by native elites in concert with their imperial British masters into "Hindu" in order to shore up power in the hands of the Brits and their allies. Rove is only slightly more subtle. Other techniques for achieving solidarity and mobilizing others into action on the behalf of power exist, but Bin Laden, Rove et al testify to the efficacy of using religion to do this.
On the other hand, only software companies and drug dealers call their customers and clients users.
I've said it before I'll say it again, even if it is a little off-topic. Technology is not neutral. It has shaped our brains themselves at least since our ancestors started making stone tools and decisively affected the course of language development.
Nobody's sure how pervasive high speed Internet access is changing our lives and our cognition (though people are researching this) but it is simply wrong to assert that the technology is neutral and that only the way it is used and the economic arrangements surrounding it that have an ethical slant. By expanding the world of human action and thought in certain ways but limiting it in the others, technology is never morally or politically neutral.