You should look back through Cringely's archives to see his annual recap of his predictions from the previous year. He's reasonably good about reviewing his predictions and calling them as hits or misses, and he gets a pretty good number of hits under a not-too-liberal interpretation.
He's not Nostradamus, but he's not clueless either.
... consoles will always be an *additional* gaming platform. People use 'puters on the job, so when they buy something for home, they get the thing they know for email, web, Quicken, etc. The installed base for PCs is far larger than necessary to support a gaming industry, and that installed base will continue because of inertia in other areas.
The ridiculously low price for consoles helps make them a secondary gaming box, or perhaps primary for certain members of the family like kids, but houses will always have PCs, and so the PC game market will continue, if only as a secondary market for console games ported to what's essentially the same hardware.
Breathless articles like this always fail to mention one thing: Who wants to check their email in the living room in front of the whole family? Or surf for pr0n? Or shop online while the kids are whining to play FF?
All I'm really pointing out is that every crime has predicate circumstances, and PGP can be part of that just like any other normally neutral item. If you stabbed someone to death, there's a knife somewhere you used. The presence of GCC on your computer might be relevent if the prosecution has charged you with writing a virus (that's not in VB). Don't let the fact that PGP was admitted as a relevent fact freak you out. A tire iron and a balaclava aren't guilty items, but they are if they're found with a flashlight, rope, sledgehammer and gunnysack, in a car cruising a high burglary zone. Pulled over for a traffic stop on the highway, those same items aren't relevent, though.
Yeah, but this is more akin to saying that the burglar had a tire iron in the trunk of his car...
You think this is extreme, but in point of fact, many jurisdictions have laws against the mere possession of house-breaking tools. IANAL, but while a crowbar won't get you thrown in jail, if a cop pulls you over cruising residential areas at midnight, looks in the trunk and finds a crowbar, rope, gunnysack, and black balaclava, you could in fact be charged and possibly convicted of intent to burglarize, almost entirely on the strength of suspicious circumstances.
Look at it another way: A guy is charged with the crime of creating and distributing child porn over secure channels on the Internet (say, a newsgroup where encrypted binaries are uploaded). If he didn't have PGP on his computer, that would be circumstantial evidence against guilt, wouldn't it? Why doesn't the reverse hold, if he does in fact have the necessary software to commit the crime?
This is no different than the fact that a guy charged with burglary had a crowbar on him. When you're suspected of a crime, the presence of the tools to commit that crime or cover it up are relevent (though not dispositive) in a criminal trial. For a guy charged with making child porn, having a digital camera is relevent; doesn't mean that your digital camera alone is going to get you thrown in jail.
This is a hail mary by the defense attorney that does nothing but put software on the same footing as other tools.
When I was an IT manager, I got these calls all the time. For a while I actually sat there for 20 minutes answering questions; then I got bored and started saying whatever to get them to go away. Then I stopped participating.
Don't take these surveys as being of the same (doubtful) statistical quality as a good Zogby. The sampling is weak, at best, and self-selecting for drones.
The problem is that the people who pursue vengeance are very often malcontents who were fired for a good reason in the first place. People who you don't have to worry about are people who probably won't get fired in the first place.
When I fired the sysadmin, we not only cut off all of her email and network access, we forced a 100% password change to trigger immediately, and manually went to everyone with VPN access and watched them do it right at that moment with secure passwords that we assigned to them.
And those colonists had no clue about massing fire, or about basic unit discipline, even. The longbows at Crecy, or crossbowmen anywhere, always acted as a massed firing unit, and absolutely slaughtered knights.
A samurai vs. a peasant with an arquebus == a dead peasant. A horde of mounted samurai vs. a disciplined, experienced firing line properly arranged == a lot of dead samurai.
While the aquarium may have less total area, the conduction of heat to the aquarium walls through oil is much, much more efficient than through air to the walls of an aluminum case, resulting in far better heat dissipation overall.
Imagine being able to spend an hour a night talking with your spouse who lives on another continent. Climbing a just-mapped temple in the jungle. Exploring the moon. Walking through a bridge in an engineering class. Seeing how two dna bases line up, or don't.
You're catching Jaron Lanier's disease: Because we could do these things, we would.
Seriously, of that list, how much of general computery things would that activity make up? Are you going to be an Amazonian explorer every day? Are you going to hop into a VR session with your spouse every night when you're on the road, or will you sometimes just send an email?
You've proved my point for me: None of your examples are things that we do every day as a normal part of our lives. You won't use VR to make a spreadsheet, or normalize a database table. FPS games are already immersive enough to cause motion sickness. We can currently videoconference around the world, yet most business communication is still by telephone or email. Regarding your flight example, did you fly to work this morning? Me, I walk every day.
We don't have VR for the same reason that websites aren't authored in Shockwave--it's massive overkill for the vast majority of things it might be applied to. The useful applications of VR are very specific, niche apps, and the rest it could be used for can't possible afford the equipment to make it work well.
Given that, there's little demand to work out the technical wrinkles that make it practical and cost effective. Do you really want to jack in just to check your mail?
I actually wonder if the ironic point he's making is that security consultants demand stupidity from corporations that no one would tolerate on a personal level. Consider:
I try to run my own network the same way I tell my clients to.
Then he goes on to present a stupid laundry list of excessive security measures that are, by implication, what he's telling his clients to do. It's obvious that, personally, they're ridiculous, so why wouldn't they also be ridiculous in a corporate environment?
if the law is an "everyone is equal" blanket, why do certain groups feel that they need special protections?
Because passing laws saying 'everyone is equal' hasn't been sufficient--not when it's the sheriff who's the grand wizard of the local chapter of the Klan, not when corporations can make excuses about the cost of employing women who'll take maternity leave, not when Steve's pictures of Adam on his desk cause him to be fired or just not promoted.
i work with people of all sorts of races, gay and straight, and we all get along just fine.
And yet some groups face more discrimination, and less effective protection under the law, by weight of culture and dominant practice. Like women. Like blacks.
Slashdot Mirror
You should look back through Cringely's archives to see his annual recap of his predictions from the previous year. He's reasonably good about reviewing his predictions and calling them as hits or misses, and he gets a pretty good number of hits under a not-too-liberal interpretation.
He's not Nostradamus, but he's not clueless either.
... consoles will always be an *additional* gaming platform. People use 'puters on the job, so when they buy something for home, they get the thing they know for email, web, Quicken, etc. The installed base for PCs is far larger than necessary to support a gaming industry, and that installed base will continue because of inertia in other areas.
The ridiculously low price for consoles helps make them a secondary gaming box, or perhaps primary for certain members of the family like kids, but houses will always have PCs, and so the PC game market will continue, if only as a secondary market for console games ported to what's essentially the same hardware.
Breathless articles like this always fail to mention one thing: Who wants to check their email in the living room in front of the whole family? Or surf for pr0n? Or shop online while the kids are whining to play FF?
Reread the article with your irony detector in the "on" position.
Did Sun promise to build the next version of Solaris around Java when I wasn't looking?
All I'm really pointing out is that every crime has predicate circumstances, and PGP can be part of that just like any other normally neutral item. If you stabbed someone to death, there's a knife somewhere you used. The presence of GCC on your computer might be relevent if the prosecution has charged you with writing a virus (that's not in VB). Don't let the fact that PGP was admitted as a relevent fact freak you out. A tire iron and a balaclava aren't guilty items, but they are if they're found with a flashlight, rope, sledgehammer and gunnysack, in a car cruising a high burglary zone. Pulled over for a traffic stop on the highway, those same items aren't relevent, though.
Yeah, but this is more akin to saying that the burglar had a tire iron in the trunk of his car...
You think this is extreme, but in point of fact, many jurisdictions have laws against the mere possession of house-breaking tools. IANAL, but while a crowbar won't get you thrown in jail, if a cop pulls you over cruising residential areas at midnight, looks in the trunk and finds a crowbar, rope, gunnysack, and black balaclava, you could in fact be charged and possibly convicted of intent to burglarize, almost entirely on the strength of suspicious circumstances.
Look at it another way: A guy is charged with the crime of creating and distributing child porn over secure channels on the Internet (say, a newsgroup where encrypted binaries are uploaded). If he didn't have PGP on his computer, that would be circumstantial evidence against guilt, wouldn't it? Why doesn't the reverse hold, if he does in fact have the necessary software to commit the crime?
This is no different than the fact that a guy charged with burglary had a crowbar on him. When you're suspected of a crime, the presence of the tools to commit that crime or cover it up are relevent (though not dispositive) in a criminal trial. For a guy charged with making child porn, having a digital camera is relevent; doesn't mean that your digital camera alone is going to get you thrown in jail.
This is a hail mary by the defense attorney that does nothing but put software on the same footing as other tools.
When I was an IT manager, I got these calls all the time. For a while I actually sat there for 20 minutes answering questions; then I got bored and started saying whatever to get them to go away. Then I stopped participating.
Don't take these surveys as being of the same (doubtful) statistical quality as a good Zogby. The sampling is weak, at best, and self-selecting for drones.
The problem is that the people who pursue vengeance are very often malcontents who were fired for a good reason in the first place. People who you don't have to worry about are people who probably won't get fired in the first place.
When I fired the sysadmin, we not only cut off all of her email and network access, we forced a 100% password change to trigger immediately, and manually went to everyone with VPN access and watched them do it right at that moment with secure passwords that we assigned to them.
I think that Order 66 will show the analogy to be false.
I'm going to buy four, just so I can sex with three of them at once.
And those colonists had no clue about massing fire, or about basic unit discipline, even. The longbows at Crecy, or crossbowmen anywhere, always acted as a massed firing unit, and absolutely slaughtered knights.
A samurai vs. a peasant with an arquebus == a dead peasant. A horde of mounted samurai vs. a disciplined, experienced firing line properly arranged == a lot of dead samurai.
While the aquarium may have less total area, the conduction of heat to the aquarium walls through oil is much, much more efficient than through air to the walls of an aluminum case, resulting in far better heat dissipation overall.
Honestly, you don't see any difference between a company found to be an abusive monopoly and a licence? None at all? Really?
./ers having trouble with rationality, my friend.
It's ain't the
And since Oracle is *way* cheaper than IBM, it's problem solved!
Imagine being able to spend an hour a night talking with your spouse who lives on another continent. Climbing a just-mapped temple in the jungle. Exploring the moon. Walking through a bridge in an engineering class. Seeing how two dna bases line up, or don't.
You're catching Jaron Lanier's disease: Because we could do these things, we would.
Seriously, of that list, how much of general computery things would that activity make up? Are you going to be an Amazonian explorer every day? Are you going to hop into a VR session with your spouse every night when you're on the road, or will you sometimes just send an email?
You've proved my point for me: None of your examples are things that we do every day as a normal part of our lives. You won't use VR to make a spreadsheet, or normalize a database table. FPS games are already immersive enough to cause motion sickness. We can currently videoconference around the world, yet most business communication is still by telephone or email. Regarding your flight example, did you fly to work this morning? Me, I walk every day.
In general.
We don't have VR for the same reason that websites aren't authored in Shockwave--it's massive overkill for the vast majority of things it might be applied to. The useful applications of VR are very specific, niche apps, and the rest it could be used for can't possible afford the equipment to make it work well.
Given that, there's little demand to work out the technical wrinkles that make it practical and cost effective. Do you really want to jack in just to check your mail?
I actually wonder if the ironic point he's making is that security consultants demand stupidity from corporations that no one would tolerate on a personal level. Consider:
I try to run my own network the same way I tell my clients to.
Then he goes on to present a stupid laundry list of excessive security measures that are, by implication, what he's telling his clients to do. It's obvious that, personally, they're ridiculous, so why wouldn't they also be ridiculous in a corporate environment?
In your case, a bigot.
In my experience, people who have qualify what they say with what it isn't, tend to be exactly what they're denying.
Remember, you're the one who started all this with the strawman about gay employees wanting legal protection to be swishy in the office.
if the law is an "everyone is equal" blanket, why do certain groups feel that they need special protections?
Because passing laws saying 'everyone is equal' hasn't been sufficient--not when it's the sheriff who's the grand wizard of the local chapter of the Klan, not when corporations can make excuses about the cost of employing women who'll take maternity leave, not when Steve's pictures of Adam on his desk cause him to be fired or just not promoted.
i work with people of all sorts of races, gay and straight, and we all get along just fine.
I sincerely doubt that.
don't make me out to be a bigot, because i am not; i'm a realist.
Not knowing what you said, you said it.
But to require that a man who likes to dress up like a woman be viewed no differently from a normal man or woman
What does cross-dressing have to do with homosexuality?
Aren't women and blacks in a better position today than they were 50 or 100 years ago, as a result of those laws?
And yet some groups face more discrimination, and less effective protection under the law, by weight of culture and dominant practice. Like women. Like blacks.