I know I am not supposed to be replying to my own post, dammit, but the more I think of this, even more I get pissed.
I know this is off topic and we are supposed to be discussing Locutus.. but this thing in the article I read just bugs me to no friggen end. And I will sacrifice karma if necessary to vent in public, but I feel its something I gotta do.
Here we are, facing a world where bandwidth is at a premium, and viral infections are running rampant, and we code some application that takes 20 MEGAbytes of loader to transfer a 400K File? C'mon! Is there any common sense left in programming any more?
If this is one of the wonders the.NET world is bringing us, is there any hope that when things do go wrong, we will have any hope in hell of finding it? Geez, its worse than cars,,, open up the hood and its full of twisty turny little passages that go everywhere, thoroughly obfuscating what is supposed to be a simple elegant function.
What in the hell is going on here?!???!
Let me now turn my PARANOIA MODE = ON.
I am really beginning to wonder, folks, if the "big guys" are coding this stuff in such a manner as to hide "bugs" which are being placed in code *on purpose* so that later the company can commandeer that machine. If somebody finds the bug, then they will release a patch... so they make humongous code so it will be very difficult, if not impossible to find all the "bugs".
It was noted in an earlier story here on slashdot about our government's role in planning "cyber attacks" on other governments. Is this some plan for planting the seeds for cyber-attacks on anyone using these systems? If so, just who knows about it. You know how insecure security through obscurity is... and there is no telling that someone you did not think knew about something did indeed know about it, but just did not use his little "ace up his sleeve" until just the moment he could pull it off and do the most harm.
I mean 20 Megabytes of code just to load something? Just what in God's Green Earth do we need with a 20 MEGABYTE loader?!!?! The more complicated we make something, the more things there is to go bad. Damm, does Microsoft value a coder by his weight?
Forgive the rant, fellas, I am just pissed at what I see happening here, and I only want to run my indignation up the flagpole to see if anyone else is getting as pissed as I over it. I know I am not supposed to use such blunt words as 'pissed', but then I am trying to accurately indicate the position I am in.
I think this is one of the things that peeve me so much about their "improvements"... from the Locutus site mentioned...
The application is only 400k in size, but many users will notice that the download is over 20MB. This is because Locutus relies on Microsoft's.NET framework,
and if a user doesn't have.NET they will automatically download a version of the installer that does.
Damm!
Locutus does look nifty though in that the files can be shared encrypted.. I take it that one must pass muster to even look at the filenames though.. otherwise what difference is it from sharing files already encrypted with pgp or similar...
No, its not the lost sales that I am concerned with so much.
Its the customers.
They went out of their way to come to the store. Most likely, they had something specific they needed. I would not want those customers leaving pissed purple with me because they traveled to my store to pick up something they needed, and I could not sell it to them.
Methinks any store which is that dependent upon a stable source of electricity to conduct their business should invest in a Uninterruptible Power Supply to handle those contigencies.
It appears to me like buying a $100 bill, much like visiting the ATM.
Yes, that cash can be stolen, burned, lost, whatever.
So, treat it like cash.
But the advantage is you don't have to piddle around with all that change. You want something, just use the card. Don't worry about trying to come up with the proper assortment of coinage, or trying to count it. Or expecting the merchant to have all the correct coinage either.
And, if you *do* succeed in losing it, its nothing you are going to *seriously* regret... like having to redo your entire accounting structure.. just take your losses like you would if you lost $100. Its not like if you got mugged for it, you are going to have to go about canceling all your credit cards, going through all the hassle of closing numerous accounts, revectoring all the auto-pay billing systems, etc.
Since layoff, I have been running on less than half of what I used to make, and still hanging on.
There is no one I can co-erce into making up the difference.
I do think the government should not be isolated from all the pains the people have to go through. I did not say they had to actually lose their jobs as I did, but pay adjustments could be in order... if they can find better elsewhere after the adjustment, thats fine too.
I might get modded down as flamebait for feeling the way I do, but if so, so be it.
I already find it hard to order items from in state, as shipping and tax together mean i can get a better deal locally a lot of the time.
That might be the whole idea.
That way we support our *local* businesses, without the internet "tax loophole" depriving them of the business. Buying common household consumables via the net is damaging the local economy, that is the merchants in your city that have invested substantial sums into providing brick-and-mortar buildings for us to shop in.
But, for those really hard to find things, nothing will beat the internet. There is no telling where the item is, nor where the person who wants it is. Nobody local is apt to stock it. And if they did, the probability that a local wants it is really low. I mean, business is business, they aren't in it for purely fun.
I am not really that excited over the tax, although in this economy, I do not like anything that lowers the purchasing power of the average consumer - for those people are the ones that are actually spending the money that is keeping the economy, or whats left of it, afloat.
Actually, the economy, more than anything else, dominates my concerns. With an engineering background, I tend to search for underlying power sources that drive phenomena; I see no more underlying power sources ( such as vibrant productive factories ) to power our economy. The main thing I see is tiers upon tiers of people in control of other people, but very few people actually *doing* anything. I am indeed concerned.
It seems every time I turn around, some organization is claiming how much their intellectual property is worth, and petitioning the California government to pass law for them to "protect" their interests.
I have property too. And I pay a "property tax" to the government, and in turn they recognize my "ownership" of said property.
Yeh, I know - one is "real" property, and the other is "intellectual" property. But they are both considered assets with a value.
Now, the problem is - if it is indeed "property", how much is it worth?
My guess is that in the case of intellectual property, its worth what you say its worth... so let them self-assess the value of each piece just as they do real property. And pay tax on that. And the amount they say its worth is the maximum amount that can be sued for.. and if the suit is successful, consider the property sold to the one who paid. Whereupon, they too can reassess what *they* think the property is worth.
I think such legislation should have been a rider to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Possibly this would keep companies from using all sorts of legal maneuvers to keep anybody else from doing anything by tying up all possible ways of doing things in the patent offices.
I read where we have plans for tampering in another country's computer infrastructure.
I have the strong suspicion they have plans too.
[ Paranoia Mode ON ]
At least with open-source and having people trained in programming, I feel we have a pretty good chance of surviving a cyber-attack... kinda like I would feel confident of crossing a desert if I knew we had trained mechanics and machinists in the envoy.
What scares the royal pookie out of me is that I am encouraged to "be a team player" and work with proprietary systems I have no idea how to troubleshoot the innards should I have to. Even having the tools to do so may be illegal (under DMCA).
Maybe its a big fear of mine, but I keep seeing these things coming up that to me should not exist.. such as loopholes in the code which allow worms to literally bring down networks of these proprietary products in seconds flat. Who really knows how to fix it on that level? I have long had the suspicion that these may be intentionally be placed in the code... but if someone finds them, only *then* they will issue a fix. Yes, please consider me a bit paranoid here, but personally, I am scared crapless that my country may depend on something it does not understand how it works. Geez, a lot of it is not even coded here! And even if it was, the aura of secrecy going on only leads me to speculate maybe somebody is up to something no good.
Maybe our government is working with the providers of proprietary software to install special..er.."features" for them that nobody else is supposed to know about.. but then, once you have security by obscurity, how can you be certain that you are the only one that knows about it... and is a party that will sneak for you - will they sneak for someone else too? What other "bugs" exist which could bring down the system or render any security methods used by an organization moot? ( I use "bugs" in quotes because the people who want them in place may have paid well to have these "features" installed in the software. ).
Again, I restate I could be well into paranoria here, but when I consider how important the computational infrastructure is to us, I consider the need for many people, not just a select few, to understand it intimately, and know exactly down to the hardware level exactly whats going on, how it works, and how to fix it if it doesn't. We have many engineers which could probably walk into any other critical infrastructure and operate it if they had to. I, for one, have worked in power plants and oil refineries, and feel I could walk in and bring one up if I had to... but then all the gauges and design specs are in plain view.
Forgive me if my rant is a bit long, but frankly, I am scared. Scared of what I do not know. Even more scared because I percieve there are many people in power taking steps to make sure that we, as a public, are to be kept ignorant of the inner workings of something I perceive so critical to our civilization. (DMCA).
I get the idea we may be going about this the same way RIAA is going after Kazaa'ers.
It is apt to grow into one humongous cat and mouse game trying to find out just *who* sent the spam.
This seems like a neat idea, and at least having the law publicly on the books gives a bit of leverage against blatant spamming, although I do get the idea it may be difficult to enforce.
I am of the idea that receiving spam may be something we will just have to live with, just as I think P2P will be something the **AA's have to live with. I just think the best idea is to know its there, and make provisions for it. It just comes with the territory, so to speak.
I know there are those of us who would like to demand we see ads if we are going to see the content, and many of us circumvent that. There are many of us ( me included ) which highly detest unsolicited ads - but I really do not see any way a lawyer is going to help me. I see both of these as a technical issue, and are best solved through technology.
Yeh, Dan, just reading all the posts coming through now... I was in the editor a bit.
When I reloaded, I see you posted too, with some nice info on the gpg.
I never got that involved with encryption, but it sure seems I remembered some command line version. I have always insisted that sets of critical maintainance tools be both GUI and Command-Line based for the exact reasons stated in many posts here - GUI for me, Scripts for things I set in place and run until I change them. (automation)
It does look like a re-release of something we have had for some time now... but under a different name now. And a much higher price...
That's the beauty of this forum.. it sure cuts through all the bs.
I got really miffed off with this when my old graphical schematic entry editor, the old PCB layout editor, and SPICE analyzer I used were re-released using Windows. I did not understand the file structures, and the files the new programs were absolutely huge. I could go with a standardized, open file format, but no, these were proprietary, hence no one else, even I, would be able to read them. Well, thats great for videogames and fad stuff I expect to no longer concern myself in six months or so, but when you talk of my design databases, it is a horse of a completely different color. I often need to access some database 10 years old to retrive some design paradigm I remember another engineer working on, so that I do not have to completely re-invent the wheel. I kept my ancient DOS system, and I still use it for my critical work, as I often import stuff I did ten years ago ( such as magnetics or power circuitry ), then work from that. This is something I flat can not do given today's tools. Even if I have the correct software vendor, if I do not have the correct version, it won't read. The funny thing is, even 10 years later, I have not seen much the new tools do that the old tools did not do.
Example. Pads PCB for DOS. I kept.
Pads went on to become Innoveda. Innoveda is now part of Mentor. Who knows when the whole thing just gets abandoned? I rest assured knowing that within my little environment the fortunes of huge megacorporations does not affect me. My little old DOS system will run, as it has for over ten years now, as it always had, and I will be able to access/edit/create files as I always have. Its kinda like an old journal, where my trusty old carbon-based pencil works every time I pick it up, and if it does not work the way its supposed to work, its obvious how to fix it.
The scheme of things seem obvious to me.
Its like a big old tree I have in the back yard.
Its trunk is rotten. It soon will no longer be able to support all the leaves on top. It will fall over. I will mulch it. From the nutrients derived from its branches and leaves will sprout new plants.
The point I am trying to make is that if the infrastructure supporting an organization is rotting, it will collapse one day. All the people working in that organization will need to find employment in another organization. The people with knowledge of technical things probably won't do too bad, but people depending on status probably will. The new organization they will be applying to probably has its fill of deadwood already. My tree is failing not because the wood in the trunk is old... its because bugs got in it and has weakened the structure so much that I expect failure any day now.
There are many other trees in the yard much older than that which will survive.. somehow they do not have the burden of bugs in their trunk.
I think of my DOS as a sturdy old tree. Maybe not as glamorous, but like my trusty old carbon pencil, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever when I pick it up that its going to work.
Hmmm. And here I am, I just prepped an old '286 ( yes, no typo, '286 ) for the grandma down the street from me because she wanted a machine just like the one she used to have and she wanted to type her recipes and her life story on it.. and she just wanted a text editor and printer - an "electric typewriter", so to speak.
I went through that old '286 before I gave it to her, and here it is, 20 years old, still working fine. I tested the caps, but none were showing degradation. This is 20 years after manufacture, fellas...
Sometimes, I wonder if we aren't running a race across the desert... everybody's lined up with all sorts of snazzy sports cars that go like blazes, but have all sorts of cooling problems, and here comes that guy in a Peterbilt truck. Won't go more than 90, but known to go millions of miles.
Yes, this is horrible.. now compound that with XP licensing schemes which detects reinstalls into another machine as a license violation.
As someone who feels responsible for the results of my consultations, I highly advise going with open-source to get around this issue, if nothing else.
If I have a whole flock of machines running and I discover I have a rampant problem, I already have my hands full. Discovering I have inadvertantly installed software that verifies which machine is running it and enforces compliance only compounds that problem.
I've seen a lot of it. I also keep a lot of small tantalums around for the bypass stuff.. some is really critical around the switching power converters, but the OEM's use aluminum because its cheaper.
I wrote a much more detailed synopsis of the failure mechanism I discovered in another post, but darn if I can find it.
Note: This is flamebait. But its just the way I feel. I may sacrifice Karma to say it but I feel I must do so.
According to my latest lookup, Bank of America is using a Netscape server. Netscape is not known for deliberately trying to screw up and mislead other peoples products, although I do not think Netscape was no guardian angel either... According to Steve Gibson's IDServe program:
Initiating server query...
Looking up IP address for domain: www.bankofamerica.com
The IP address for the domain is:
171.159.65.173
Connecting to the server on standard HTTP port:80
[Connected] Requesting the server's default page.
The server returned the following response
headers:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Netscape-Enterprise/6.0
Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 22:02:15 GMT
Content-type: text/html
P3P: CP="CAO IND PHY ONL UNI FIN COM NAV INT DEM CNT STA POL HEA PRE GOV CUR ADM DEV TAI PSA PSD IVAi IVDi CONo TELo OUR SAMi OTRi"
For those with Windoze boxes, Steve Gibson makes his ID serve identifier program available at
Gibson Research.
I use this a lot when I decide if I want to open an account with some internet merchant. I know I use a non-IE browser and know MS is using their stuff to hang up non MS stuff, so if I see the IIS server come up, there is no way I'm doing business with *that*. My fear is it will get my CC info, hang up somewhere, and leave me wondering whether or not my transaction completed. I know the tactics by now. I'll browse, and if necessary I'll read the document source if Microsoft succeeded in fouling the file so much as to render it unreadable in the browser, but there is no way in he** I am giving my CC info to some MS server.
What amazes me is that after society has invested so much money in us, they tell us that we no longer have a job after we pass 40 or so.
I used to work in the Aerospace industry. Analog design. Power. RF/Microwave. Robotics. Loved it. But things changed. Layoffs.
So, I have been freelancing for ten years.
I consider myself extremely educated in the physics of why things work, but dumber than shit on "people skills". I easily get tripped up if someone asks me to do something I have good reason to believe won't work, and tell the truth, even though it costs me the job.
And print our version of what we agree to in fine print on the back of our purchase order forms.
IANAL, but something down the line that we reserve the right to make backup copies, reverse the code if necessary to obtain interoperability with our system, and any fees or charges due us if their software fails to perform as advertised.
Then, if they pull that EULA "agree" button crap, we can just pull our our purchase requisiton, which they accepted by shipping product and accepting payment.
It is just human nature. We *love* to control things. Thats why we have pets and toys and the like. They even have little peanut dispensers for the *humans* so we get to give the peanuts to the elephants.
Although we drop quarters into the peanut dispenser so we get to choose which elephant gets the peanut, there are others who have found ways to control other humans.. I think for fun. The things mentioned above are fitting examples.
Apparently you can if you are running OSR2 ( Win 950B ). This is some stuff I garnered off the net; I wish I had the exact links to give you, but I don't. Only thing I can say is that at one time, it looks as if USB could be run from WIN95, so you won't waste your time looking for something non-existent. I am in a similar quest right now, so I will share what I have. You may wanna do google searches on phrases like "uhcd.sys", "usbd.sys","vlxausb.exe", and "usbsupp.exe", which are the exact file names I have been running across. I leave you with a readme I dug up on Microsoft's web site some time ago.. but I can not find it anymore.
Microsoft Windows 95 README for Microsoft Windows
October 1996
(c) Copyright Microsoft Corporation, 1996
HOW TO USE THIS DOCUMENT
To view Readme.txt on screen in Notepad, maximize the Notepad window.
To print Readme.txt, open it in Notepad or another word processor, then use the Print command on the File menu.
HOW TO INSTALL THIS PRODUCT
In order to install Universal Serial Bus support on a PC, Windows 95, version 950B must be running.
This can be determined by checking the version of Windows by right clicking on "My Computer" and selecting properties. The general tab
will show the Windows version. If it lists the system as 4.00.950B, this product can be installed safely on your PC.
NOTE:
If your version of Windows is not 4.00.950B the PC will not accept the USB files and fail to install. No harm will be encountered by the
system from trying to install USB support.
To install this product:
1. Start Windows Explorer.
2. Click on the A: drive to display the contents of the floppy disk.
3. Double click on USBSUPP.EXE
HOW TO UNINSTALL THIS PRODUCT
1) Once you have installed the USB Supplement, it can be uninstalled from Control Panel, Add/Remove components. If for any reason you wish to reinstall the USB supplement, you must first uninstall any version currently on your system.
GENERAL INFO
For the latest information on Supportability and Troubleshooting the USB Supplement, check out http://WWW.MICROSOFT.COM/KB for access to our online Knowledge Base.
For USB device specific issues, contact your OEM or Vendor of the device.
These products are manufactured independent of Microsoft Corp.
Note that a substantial amount of logic is still required to support the floppies... there is a separate interface and cabling for them.
I have used floppies since they first came out, and before that I used paper tape and punch cards. I can not say something is superior just because I have used it, but I admit I hated to see the punch tape go because I felt so secure in the fact I could actually see the data. Even after so called "support" for punch tape was revoked, those of us with those old KSR-33 machines and optical readers still worked through the serial and parallel ports for several more years until our legacy stuff finally gave way to later technologies.
As far as things like homework, that is what networking is for. As cheap as storage/communication has become, I see no reason where things like homework assignments can't just be kept on the college's server. I have had several classes that did just that. As students, we each had an FTP account, and the instructor knew exactly where our homework was supposed to be.
I am not saying get rid of floppies entirely.. as long as interface cards exist and the manufacturers leave at least bios recognition and mechanical mounting provisions for them, I will not hold it against them for not installing them in the first place. I do request, however, that they leave provisions in place for retrofits, should that be necessary.
It would not surprise me one bit if we find we can program it to go to the battery charger and swap its main battery for the one in the charger ( the few seconds it is without main battery, it could run on a smaller backup or "ultracapacitor". ) In addition, it could probably maintain statistics on all the batteries in use and know which ones are beginning to show failure and make appropriate recommendations when replacement is due and how urgent.
Remember, this thing is Linux. This thing, theoretically, can do whatever its hardware will permit it to do. It would not surprise me a bit if it can be programmed to recognize faces, it could recognize its battery charger and be programmed with what steps it takes to swap out the batteries, provided we equip it with the mechanical ability to do so.
Not much different from us.
We have to honor nature calls too. Every couple of hours or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Let the **AA people read and poke through every .ppt file on the net. It'll build character.
I know I am not supposed to be replying to my own post, dammit, but the more I think of this, even more I get pissed.
I know this is off topic and we are supposed to be discussing Locutus.. but this thing in the article I read just bugs me to no friggen end. And I will sacrifice karma if necessary to vent in public, but I feel its something I gotta do.
Here we are, facing a world where bandwidth is at a premium, and viral infections are running rampant, and we code some application that takes 20 MEGAbytes of loader to transfer a 400K File? C'mon! Is there any common sense left in programming any more?
If this is one of the wonders the .NET world is bringing us, is there any hope that when things do go wrong, we will have any hope in hell of finding it? Geez, its worse than cars,,, open up the hood and its full of twisty turny little passages that go everywhere, thoroughly obfuscating what is supposed to be a simple elegant function.
What in the hell is going on here?!???!
Let me now turn my PARANOIA MODE = ON.
I am really beginning to wonder, folks, if the "big guys" are coding this stuff in such a manner as to hide "bugs" which are being placed in code *on purpose* so that later the company can commandeer that machine. If somebody finds the bug, then they will release a patch... so they make humongous code so it will be very difficult, if not impossible to find all the "bugs".
It was noted in an earlier story here on slashdot about our government's role in planning "cyber attacks" on other governments. Is this some plan for planting the seeds for cyber-attacks on anyone using these systems? If so, just who knows about it. You know how insecure security through obscurity is... and there is no telling that someone you did not think knew about something did indeed know about it, but just did not use his little "ace up his sleeve" until just the moment he could pull it off and do the most harm.
I mean 20 Megabytes of code just to load something? Just what in God's Green Earth do we need with a 20 MEGABYTE loader?!!?! The more complicated we make something, the more things there is to go bad. Damm, does Microsoft value a coder by his weight?
Forgive the rant, fellas, I am just pissed at what I see happening here, and I only want to run my indignation up the flagpole to see if anyone else is getting as pissed as I over it. I know I am not supposed to use such blunt words as 'pissed', but then I am trying to accurately indicate the position I am in.
The application is only 400k in size, but many users will notice that the download is over 20MB. This is because Locutus relies on Microsoft's .NET framework,
and if a user doesn't have .NET they will automatically download a version of the installer that does.
Damm!
Locutus does look nifty though in that the files can be shared encrypted.. I take it that one must pass muster to even look at the filenames though.. otherwise what difference is it from sharing files already encrypted with pgp or similar...
Its the customers.
They went out of their way to come to the store. Most likely, they had something specific they needed. I would not want those customers leaving pissed purple with me because they traveled to my store to pick up something they needed, and I could not sell it to them.
Methinks any store which is that dependent upon a stable source of electricity to conduct their business should invest in a Uninterruptible Power Supply to handle those contigencies.
It appears to me like buying a $100 bill, much like visiting the ATM.
Yes, that cash can be stolen, burned, lost, whatever.
So, treat it like cash.
But the advantage is you don't have to piddle around with all that change. You want something, just use the card. Don't worry about trying to come up with the proper assortment of coinage, or trying to count it. Or expecting the merchant to have all the correct coinage either.
And, if you *do* succeed in losing it, its nothing you are going to *seriously* regret... like having to redo your entire accounting structure.. just take your losses like you would if you lost $100. Its not like if you got mugged for it, you are going to have to go about canceling all your credit cards, going through all the hassle of closing numerous accounts, revectoring all the auto-pay billing systems, etc.
It looks like a good thing to me so far.
Just keep my personal life out of it.
Since layoff, I have been running on less than half of what I used to make, and still hanging on.
There is no one I can co-erce into making up the difference.
I do think the government should not be isolated from all the pains the people have to go through. I did not say they had to actually lose their jobs as I did, but pay adjustments could be in order... if they can find better elsewhere after the adjustment, thats fine too.
I might get modded down as flamebait for feeling the way I do, but if so, so be it.
That might be the whole idea.
That way we support our *local* businesses, without the internet "tax loophole" depriving them of the business. Buying common household consumables via the net is damaging the local economy, that is the merchants in your city that have invested substantial sums into providing brick-and-mortar buildings for us to shop in.
But, for those really hard to find things, nothing will beat the internet. There is no telling where the item is, nor where the person who wants it is. Nobody local is apt to stock it. And if they did, the probability that a local wants it is really low. I mean, business is business, they aren't in it for purely fun.
I am not really that excited over the tax, although in this economy, I do not like anything that lowers the purchasing power of the average consumer - for those people are the ones that are actually spending the money that is keeping the economy, or whats left of it, afloat.
Actually, the economy, more than anything else, dominates my concerns. With an engineering background, I tend to search for underlying power sources that drive phenomena; I see no more underlying power sources ( such as vibrant productive factories ) to power our economy. The main thing I see is tiers upon tiers of people in control of other people, but very few people actually *doing* anything. I am indeed concerned.
I have property too. And I pay a "property tax" to the government, and in turn they recognize my "ownership" of said property.
Yeh, I know - one is "real" property, and the other is "intellectual" property. But they are both considered assets with a value.
Now, the problem is - if it is indeed "property", how much is it worth?
My guess is that in the case of intellectual property, its worth what you say its worth... so let them self-assess the value of each piece just as they do real property. And pay tax on that. And the amount they say its worth is the maximum amount that can be sued for.. and if the suit is successful, consider the property sold to the one who paid. Whereupon, they too can reassess what *they* think the property is worth.
I think such legislation should have been a rider to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
Possibly this would keep companies from using all sorts of legal maneuvers to keep anybody else from doing anything by tying up all possible ways of doing things in the patent offices.
I have the strong suspicion they have plans too.
[ Paranoia Mode ON ]
At least with open-source and having people trained in programming, I feel we have a pretty good chance of surviving a cyber-attack... kinda like I would feel confident of crossing a desert if I knew we had trained mechanics and machinists in the envoy.
What scares the royal pookie out of me is that I am encouraged to "be a team player" and work with proprietary systems I have no idea how to troubleshoot the innards should I have to. Even having the tools to do so may be illegal (under DMCA).
Maybe its a big fear of mine, but I keep seeing these things coming up that to me should not exist.. such as loopholes in the code which allow worms to literally bring down networks of these proprietary products in seconds flat. Who really knows how to fix it on that level? I have long had the suspicion that these may be intentionally be placed in the code... but if someone finds them, only *then* they will issue a fix. Yes, please consider me a bit paranoid here, but personally, I am scared crapless that my country may depend on something it does not understand how it works. Geez, a lot of it is not even coded here! And even if it was, the aura of secrecy going on only leads me to speculate maybe somebody is up to something no good.
Maybe our government is working with the providers of proprietary software to install special ..er.."features" for them that nobody else is supposed to know about.. but then, once you have security by obscurity, how can you be certain that you are the only one that knows about it... and is a party that will sneak for you - will they sneak for someone else too? What other "bugs" exist which could bring down the system or render any security methods used by an organization moot? ( I use "bugs" in quotes because the people who want them in place may have paid well to have these "features" installed in the software. ).
Again, I restate I could be well into paranoria here, but when I consider how important the computational infrastructure is to us, I consider the need for many people, not just a select few, to understand it intimately, and know exactly down to the hardware level exactly whats going on, how it works, and how to fix it if it doesn't. We have many engineers which could probably walk into any other critical infrastructure and operate it if they had to. I, for one, have worked in power plants and oil refineries, and feel I could walk in and bring one up if I had to... but then all the gauges and design specs are in plain view.
Forgive me if my rant is a bit long, but frankly, I am scared. Scared of what I do not know. Even more scared because I percieve there are many people in power taking steps to make sure that we, as a public, are to be kept ignorant of the inner workings of something I perceive so critical to our civilization. (DMCA).
[ paranoria mode still on ]
It is apt to grow into one humongous cat and mouse game trying to find out just *who* sent the spam.
This seems like a neat idea, and at least having the law publicly on the books gives a bit of leverage against blatant spamming, although I do get the idea it may be difficult to enforce.
I am of the idea that receiving spam may be something we will just have to live with, just as I think P2P will be something the **AA's have to live with. I just think the best idea is to know its there, and make provisions for it. It just comes with the territory, so to speak.
I know there are those of us who would like to demand we see ads if we are going to see the content, and many of us circumvent that. There are many of us ( me included ) which highly detest unsolicited ads - but I really do not see any way a lawyer is going to help me. I see both of these as a technical issue, and are best solved through technology.
When I reloaded, I see you posted too, with some nice info on the gpg.
I never got that involved with encryption, but it sure seems I remembered some command line version. I have always insisted that sets of critical maintainance tools be both GUI and Command-Line based for the exact reasons stated in many posts here - GUI for me, Scripts for things I set in place and run until I change them. (automation)
It does look like a re-release of something we have had for some time now... but under a different name now. And a much higher price...
That's the beauty of this forum.. it sure cuts through all the bs.
There are many things I automate, like you indicate like cron jobs, that automatically perform a given set of operations related to some event.
GUI is for human operators, where scripts are optimal for the machine usage.
It seems like I remember somewhere there was a precursor to PGP what *was* command-line.. is it something like gpg or something? I am rusty here.
I got really miffed off with this when my old graphical schematic entry editor, the old PCB layout editor, and SPICE analyzer I used were re-released using Windows. I did not understand the file structures, and the files the new programs were absolutely huge. I could go with a standardized, open file format, but no, these were proprietary, hence no one else, even I, would be able to read them. Well, thats great for videogames and fad stuff I expect to no longer concern myself in six months or so, but when you talk of my design databases, it is a horse of a completely different color. I often need to access some database 10 years old to retrive some design paradigm I remember another engineer working on, so that I do not have to completely re-invent the wheel. I kept my ancient DOS system, and I still use it for my critical work, as I often import stuff I did ten years ago ( such as magnetics or power circuitry ), then work from that. This is something I flat can not do given today's tools. Even if I have the correct software vendor, if I do not have the correct version, it won't read. The funny thing is, even 10 years later, I have not seen much the new tools do that the old tools did not do.
Example. Pads PCB for DOS. I kept.
Pads went on to become Innoveda. Innoveda is now part of Mentor. Who knows when the whole thing just gets abandoned? I rest assured knowing that within my little environment the fortunes of huge megacorporations does not affect me. My little old DOS system will run, as it has for over ten years now, as it always had, and I will be able to access/edit/create files as I always have. Its kinda like an old journal, where my trusty old carbon-based pencil works every time I pick it up, and if it does not work the way its supposed to work, its obvious how to fix it.
The scheme of things seem obvious to me.
Its like a big old tree I have in the back yard.
Its trunk is rotten. It soon will no longer be able to support all the leaves on top. It will fall over. I will mulch it. From the nutrients derived from its branches and leaves will sprout new plants.
The point I am trying to make is that if the infrastructure supporting an organization is rotting, it will collapse one day. All the people working in that organization will need to find employment in another organization. The people with knowledge of technical things probably won't do too bad, but people depending on status probably will. The new organization they will be applying to probably has its fill of deadwood already. My tree is failing not because the wood in the trunk is old... its because bugs got in it and has weakened the structure so much that I expect failure any day now.
There are many other trees in the yard much older than that which will survive.. somehow they do not have the burden of bugs in their trunk.
I think of my DOS as a sturdy old tree. Maybe not as glamorous, but like my trusty old carbon pencil, there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever when I pick it up that its going to work.
I went through that old '286 before I gave it to her, and here it is, 20 years old, still working fine. I tested the caps, but none were showing degradation. This is 20 years after manufacture, fellas...
Sometimes, I wonder if we aren't running a race across the desert... everybody's lined up with all sorts of snazzy sports cars that go like blazes, but have all sorts of cooling problems, and here comes that guy in a Peterbilt truck. Won't go more than 90, but known to go millions of miles.
I wonder who makes it across the desert.
As someone who feels responsible for the results of my consultations, I highly advise going with open-source to get around this issue, if nothing else.
If I have a whole flock of machines running and I discover I have a rampant problem, I already have my hands full. Discovering I have inadvertantly installed software that verifies which machine is running it and enforces compliance only compounds that problem.
I keep a stock of 680uF, 200V caps for this.
I've seen a lot of it. I also keep a lot of small tantalums around for the bypass stuff.. some is really critical around the switching power converters, but the OEM's use aluminum because its cheaper.
I wrote a much more detailed synopsis of the failure mechanism I discovered in another post, but darn if I can find it.
According to my latest lookup, Bank of America is using a Netscape server. Netscape is not known for deliberately trying to screw up and mislead other peoples products, although I do not think Netscape was no guardian angel either... According to Steve Gibson's IDServe program:
For those with Windoze boxes, Steve Gibson makes his ID serve identifier program available at Gibson ResearchI use this a lot when I decide if I want to open an account with some internet merchant. I know I use a non-IE browser and know MS is using their stuff to hang up non MS stuff, so if I see the IIS server come up, there is no way I'm doing business with *that*. My fear is it will get my CC info, hang up somewhere, and leave me wondering whether or not my transaction completed. I know the tactics by now. I'll browse, and if necessary I'll read the document source if Microsoft succeeded in fouling the file so much as to render it unreadable in the browser, but there is no way in he** I am giving my CC info to some MS server.
I used to work in the Aerospace industry. Analog design. Power. RF/Microwave. Robotics. Loved it. But things changed. Layoffs.
So, I have been freelancing for ten years.
I consider myself extremely educated in the physics of why things work, but dumber than shit on "people skills". I easily get tripped up if someone asks me to do something I have good reason to believe won't work, and tell the truth, even though it costs me the job.
IANAL, but something down the line that we reserve the right to make backup copies, reverse the code if necessary to obtain interoperability with our system, and any fees or charges due us if their software fails to perform as advertised.
Then, if they pull that EULA "agree" button crap, we can just pull our our purchase requisiton, which they accepted by shipping product and accepting payment.
It is just human nature. We *love* to control things. Thats why we have pets and toys and the like. They even have little peanut dispensers for the *humans* so we get to give the peanuts to the elephants.
Although we drop quarters into the peanut dispenser so we get to choose which elephant gets the peanut, there are others who have found ways to control other humans.. I think for fun. The things mentioned above are fitting examples.
Microsoft Windows 95 README for Microsoft Windows October 1996
(c) Copyright Microsoft Corporation, 1996
HOW TO USE THIS DOCUMENT
To view Readme.txt on screen in Notepad, maximize the Notepad window.
To print Readme.txt, open it in Notepad or another word processor, then use the Print command on the File menu.
HOW TO INSTALL THIS PRODUCT
In order to install Universal Serial Bus support on a PC, Windows 95, version 950B must be running.
This can be determined by checking the version of Windows by right clicking on "My Computer" and selecting properties. The general tab will show the Windows version. If it lists the system as 4.00.950B, this product can be installed safely on your PC.
NOTE:
If your version of Windows is not 4.00.950B the PC will not accept the USB files and fail to install. No harm will be encountered by the system from trying to install USB support.
To install this product:
1. Start Windows Explorer.
2. Click on the A: drive to display the contents of the floppy disk.
3. Double click on USBSUPP.EXE
HOW TO UNINSTALL THIS PRODUCT
1) Once you have installed the USB Supplement, it can be uninstalled from Control Panel, Add/Remove components. If for any reason you wish to reinstall the USB supplement, you must first uninstall any version currently on your system.
GENERAL INFO
For the latest information on Supportability and Troubleshooting the USB Supplement, check out http://WWW.MICROSOFT.COM/KB for access to our online Knowledge Base.
For USB device specific issues, contact your OEM or Vendor of the device.
These products are manufactured independent of Microsoft Corp.
Note that a substantial amount of logic is still required to support the floppies... there is a separate interface and cabling for them.
I have used floppies since they first came out, and before that I used paper tape and punch cards. I can not say something is superior just because I have used it, but I admit I hated to see the punch tape go because I felt so secure in the fact I could actually see the data. Even after so called "support" for punch tape was revoked, those of us with those old KSR-33 machines and optical readers still worked through the serial and parallel ports for several more years until our legacy stuff finally gave way to later technologies.
As far as things like homework, that is what networking is for. As cheap as storage/communication has become, I see no reason where things like homework assignments can't just be kept on the college's server. I have had several classes that did just that. As students, we each had an FTP account, and the instructor knew exactly where our homework was supposed to be.
I am not saying get rid of floppies entirely.. as long as interface cards exist and the manufacturers leave at least bios recognition and mechanical mounting provisions for them, I will not hold it against them for not installing them in the first place. I do request, however, that they leave provisions in place for retrofits, should that be necessary.
Remember, this thing is Linux. This thing, theoretically, can do whatever its hardware will permit it to do. It would not surprise me a bit if it can be programmed to recognize faces, it could recognize its battery charger and be programmed with what steps it takes to swap out the batteries, provided we equip it with the mechanical ability to do so.
Not much different from us.
We have to honor nature calls too. Every couple of hours or so.