Maybe the internet can actually be secured. But so far, all the signs seem to say that it can not be -- at least not any time soon
The Internet is pretty secure. The issues with unauthenticated updates to BGP were fixed a couple of years back and I don't remember anything major since then. The endpoints connected to the Internet are a very different matter, but unless you're advocating typewriters then they're largely unavoidable.
I've been quite impressed with Apple's News. It manages to pick topics that I'm interested in, but without universally picking sources that have biasses that I agree with. I see quite a lot from the Guardian and BBC News, but there's also a fair smattering of Daily Express, Daily Mail and Telegraph in there, as well as a bunch of other things. I've been particularly amused by the shift in the Evening Standards reporting from entirely pro-Tory to being opposed to anyone that slighted George Osborne during his time in government (i.e. most of the Tory party).
I worked briefly for somewhere that paid salary and a half for overtime and had a rule that you could only carry 1.5 days of leave into the next year. Anything else was lost. If you wanted to be paid for it, then you'd book leave and then come into work, getting paid at the higher rate.
The system wasn't intentionally set up like that, but it provided incentives in exactly the right direction: if you make someone work during their leave then it costs more.
As I recall, they also had a bug in their system that meant that you could get time off in lieu at the overtime rate instead of pay, so you could book off a day, work that day, and end up with 1.5 days of overtime. If you did this for a month, you'd accumulate an extra two weeks of leave on top of what you started with. You could then work these two weeks and get paid salary-and-a-half. Correctly managing the system let everyone implicitly bump their salary.
This is probably the reason that most universities don't track vacation time: give some complex rules to a bunch of smart people and they're going to find loopholes that cost you money.
If your employee productivity is 60% then that lets you justify hiring two thirds more of them, which makes your department bigger and justifies a larger salary for you.
What, you thought the incentives for the manager were aligned with the interests of the company?
We have a bunch of build servers with 16 cores (32 threads), in two sockets. These are currently Xeons, but we don't actually need any of the Xeon features for most of them. A 18-core single-socket machine would probably be faster for most of our workloads and the cache design of these looks better suited to our jobs (more L2, less L3). And these are at a price where they'd go in workstations with 64GB of RAM and a decent SSD, rather than in shared machines.
From previous communication with the ASA, material on a company's web site is not regarded as advertising and complaints about such material should directed to the office of fair trading (which no longer exists).
A lot of the important technologies were OPENSTEP / OpenStep, rather than NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP didn't have the Foundation framework, which provided a memory management model for Objective-C. Apple moved this into the compiler with ARC, but was only able to do this without breaking interoperability because the APIs enforced reference counting discipline and had a set of conventions for naming that indicated which methods would return pointers with different ownership semantics. The earlier NeXT (NX-prefixed) GUI classes that evolved into (NS-prefixed, for NeXT-Sun) the Application Kit didn't have any of this as a building block and so passed around C strings with unclear ownership semantics all over the place.
To this day, I've not seen a language or library provide a better string abstraction than OpenStep's NSString, which gracefully handles different character sets, different path models, and different storage back ends, without troubling the consumer.
Too bad there has never been a complete NEXTSTEP like DE for either Linux or BSD. And no, WindowMaker, AfterStep et al don't count.
Note: GNUstep provides a complete implementation of the OpenStep Foundation and Application Kits and a lot of the newer Apple additions, though it's sorely in need of more contributors.
Not another single Woz, but by that time the landscape had changed and it was far less important to have a single person who could lay out circuit boards and design the bytecode interpreter that you use to run 16-bit code on an 8-bit CPU. He did find a lot of exceedingly competent hardware and software people though and wasn't above licensing good ideas from other places when required or collaborating. The NeXT-Sun collaboration on the OpenStep specification (still visible in Cocoa, where most of the common classes retain the NeXT-Sun NS prefix) produced one of the most beautifully designed APIs of all time (some parts, such as NSCell, are horribly dated as optimisations for a machine with 8MB of RAM, but the overall design is still worth studying). The DMA engine on the NeXT machines meant that it could happily play back audio while running disk-intensive tasks, something that PCs would struggle with until a decade later. Display PostScript (licensed from Adobe) allowed resolution-independent displays and made it trivial to use the same code for drawing on screen and generating high-quality printed output.
Apple paying Creative hundreds of millions of dollars for ripping off their UI kind of says the iPod was nothing more than a prettier Creative media player
It also used a smaller form factor hard disk. The Creative models used 2.5" disks, the iPod used 1.8" ones. This was important because the first iPod was right at the upper end of being convenient to carry around. The second / third generation were thinner. Second, they used Firewire for syncing (later USB 2, when it became available). The Creative ones used USB 1.1, which meant that a full sync took well over an hour, compared to 10-20 minutes for the iPod. Finally, the use of iTunes meant that the iPod had a database of all of the metadata as soon as the sync was finished, whereas the Creative ones had file/folder navigation and (I think - it's been over a decade since I used one) would eventually scan all of the ID3 tags to give tag-based navigation.
Not to question your memory, but the "IBM 8080 machine" sounds more like an Intel development system
Could be. I think I was 8 or 9 at the time, so my memory is pretty hazy. The company did quite a lot of RMX work, so it seems more likely that they'd have Intel systems than IBM ones.
Hmm, the wiki still lists it as a to-do feature. Does it support transparent handoff between clients (i.e. I start on my computer, finish on my phone and the other contact doesn't notice) and is there a mechanism for syncing message histories between multiple clients?
I suspect the business model that will emerge is short-term laptop rental places at airports. Take your documents along on an encrypted USB flash drive and attach them. Of course, the NSA will install spyware on all of the rental laptops, so they can get a good look at everyone's data.
That's easy. Use a Chromebook and pick up a new one when you land. That way, all of your data is available on Google's servers for the US government to look at and decide whether they whether they want to let you into the country, before you even board the plane.
Let me guess: you pirated the games. This kind of logic was an early copy protection mechanism. When you bought them, you got a little pamphlet with hints and clues for the hardest puzzles.
More seriously, there are lots of reasons to have multiple GitHub accounts. There are quite a few people at Microsoft, for example, who have an account with MSFT in their name for open source work-related stuff and another account for private stuff. Additionally, GitHub uses a horrible ACL mechanism, rather than a simple capability mechanism, for authorising applications, which means that the easiest way of granting rights to monitor a repository to something like Travis-CI or Coverity or similar is to create a new account that has access only to that repository and create an OAuth token for that user. It's not surprising that the number would quadruple when there are lots of good reasons for people to have 2-3 accounts...
it seems highly unlikely he would then go after people as the author in jurisdictions that don't recognize the public domain
The author might not, but with the current duration of copyright, are you sure about their heirs? If you want what people intend when they say public domain, look at the Creative Commons Zero license, which exists specifically to address these problems.
No it isn't. In some countries, public domain as a concept doesn't exist. In some others, public domain does exist, but things can't be explicitly assigned to the public domain and only end up there once copyright expires. In any of these jurisdictions, in the absence of a license the default remains that you have no rights. Additionally, if you simply place something in the public domain without a disclaimer of warranty, then you may find yourself liable for any of bugs in the code.
I'd just use a Tox client; it's like OpenVPN, but for messaging and most Tox clients do everything Skype does.
With one big and important exception: It doesn't yet handle multiple devices. Skype can be installed on your computer and your phone and used from either with the same set of contacts and with handoff between them.
Waze is an interesting one, because it uses the location data that you're constantly collecting to monitor traffic patterns. Even when you're not using it for navigation, you're providing real-time data for people who are. If everyone turns it off as you've done, then it becomes less useful for everyone else, yet the incentives are to turn it off to preserve battery: it's a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. The question then becomes whether it's possible to collect this data in a privacy-preserving way.
It's obviously possible for the server to simply discard the sender part of the data when collecting it, but can you somehow ensure that the server never receives this, but does get information about traffic density and speed?
As long as the terms of the transaction are clear, there is nothing wrong with that
They never are. Even when, like Google, they're open about what they collect (as long as you bother to go and look), they're not open about the kind of inferences that they can run. For example, the Google Ads and Facebook tracking cookies let these companies know exactly which news articles you read online. If you use GMail or Facebook, they can infer which topics are important to you and likely to influence your vote. They can also infer which of the people in your social network are influenced by the opinions of other and which are the ones of influence. They can target ads to persuade the opinion formers that a particular political party or candidate cares about the issues that they care about. They can correlate this with your address to find which of you are in swing constituencies and which are undecided voters and target those more aggressively (Facebook will even sell this information: a list of undecided voters and the most important issues to them).
Do you think most consumers who use Google and Facebook think about this and say to themselves 'yes, that's totally fine, and definitely worth the service that I'm receiving?'
I enjoyed the Zork series when I was a child and my father said I should play this game and see the original. We found an old IBM 8080 machine in the back of a store room along with the OS and ADVENT on a pair of 8" floppy disks and played it on the terminal (the entire machine was a big blue box with the backplane and various circuit boards - we had to pull a couple apart to get the full set of working ones - another big blue box containing two 8" floppy disk drives, and a blue [you might spot a theme here. Big Blue was really into branding] terminal). The entire machine was bigger than I was back then.
A few years later I bought a Psion Series 3 (256KB of RAM, also used for persistent storage) and a 128KB flash SSD (a single cell, so you could write to it at arbitrary granularity, but erasing didn't free space and you had to back everything up, erase it, and restore the things you wanted). I bought Infozip (Infocom interpreter) and The Lost Treasures of Infocom to play on it. Most of the games fitted happily on the 128KB flash drive, with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a 150KB monster) being the one exception.
Infozip came with a port of ADVENT. I think that was the first time I'd really appreciated the rate of technological advance. The old IBM monster was less powerful than a machine that I carried around in my jacket pocket.
I'm not sure how applicable most of this is outside of the UK. In the UK, departments are ranked by the REF and previously by the RAE, which looks at roughly one 'output' (typically a publication) per year per academic. Publishing a lot of different things doesn't help you, publishing one thing in a top venue does. I'm not aware of any other country that uses a similar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the internet can actually be secured. But so far, all the signs seem to say that it can not be -- at least not any time soon
The Internet is pretty secure. The issues with unauthenticated updates to BGP were fixed a couple of years back and I don't remember anything major since then. The endpoints connected to the Internet are a very different matter, but unless you're advocating typewriters then they're largely unavoidable.
I've been quite impressed with Apple's News. It manages to pick topics that I'm interested in, but without universally picking sources that have biasses that I agree with. I see quite a lot from the Guardian and BBC News, but there's also a fair smattering of Daily Express, Daily Mail and Telegraph in there, as well as a bunch of other things. I've been particularly amused by the shift in the Evening Standards reporting from entirely pro-Tory to being opposed to anyone that slighted George Osborne during his time in government (i.e. most of the Tory party).
Please name the company so that we can all learn from your experience and avoid working for them.
I worked briefly for somewhere that paid salary and a half for overtime and had a rule that you could only carry 1.5 days of leave into the next year. Anything else was lost. If you wanted to be paid for it, then you'd book leave and then come into work, getting paid at the higher rate.
The system wasn't intentionally set up like that, but it provided incentives in exactly the right direction: if you make someone work during their leave then it costs more.
As I recall, they also had a bug in their system that meant that you could get time off in lieu at the overtime rate instead of pay, so you could book off a day, work that day, and end up with 1.5 days of overtime. If you did this for a month, you'd accumulate an extra two weeks of leave on top of what you started with. You could then work these two weeks and get paid salary-and-a-half. Correctly managing the system let everyone implicitly bump their salary.
This is probably the reason that most universities don't track vacation time: give some complex rules to a bunch of smart people and they're going to find loopholes that cost you money.
If your employee productivity is 60% then that lets you justify hiring two thirds more of them, which makes your department bigger and justifies a larger salary for you.
What, you thought the incentives for the manager were aligned with the interests of the company?
We have a bunch of build servers with 16 cores (32 threads), in two sockets. These are currently Xeons, but we don't actually need any of the Xeon features for most of them. A 18-core single-socket machine would probably be faster for most of our workloads and the cache design of these looks better suited to our jobs (more L2, less L3). And these are at a price where they'd go in workstations with 64GB of RAM and a decent SSD, rather than in shared machines.
No, he can afford $700 for something that he thinks is worth $700 (or more), but the lack of a headphone jack makes it worth less than $700 to him.
From previous communication with the ASA, material on a company's web site is not regarded as advertising and complaints about such material should directed to the office of fair trading (which no longer exists).
To this day, I've not seen a language or library provide a better string abstraction than OpenStep's NSString, which gracefully handles different character sets, different path models, and different storage back ends, without troubling the consumer.
Too bad there has never been a complete NEXTSTEP like DE for either Linux or BSD. And no, WindowMaker, AfterStep et al don't count.
Note: GNUstep provides a complete implementation of the OpenStep Foundation and Application Kits and a lot of the newer Apple additions, though it's sorely in need of more contributors.
Not another single Woz, but by that time the landscape had changed and it was far less important to have a single person who could lay out circuit boards and design the bytecode interpreter that you use to run 16-bit code on an 8-bit CPU. He did find a lot of exceedingly competent hardware and software people though and wasn't above licensing good ideas from other places when required or collaborating. The NeXT-Sun collaboration on the OpenStep specification (still visible in Cocoa, where most of the common classes retain the NeXT-Sun NS prefix) produced one of the most beautifully designed APIs of all time (some parts, such as NSCell, are horribly dated as optimisations for a machine with 8MB of RAM, but the overall design is still worth studying). The DMA engine on the NeXT machines meant that it could happily play back audio while running disk-intensive tasks, something that PCs would struggle with until a decade later. Display PostScript (licensed from Adobe) allowed resolution-independent displays and made it trivial to use the same code for drawing on screen and generating high-quality printed output.
Apple paying Creative hundreds of millions of dollars for ripping off their UI kind of says the iPod was nothing more than a prettier Creative media player
It also used a smaller form factor hard disk. The Creative models used 2.5" disks, the iPod used 1.8" ones. This was important because the first iPod was right at the upper end of being convenient to carry around. The second / third generation were thinner. Second, they used Firewire for syncing (later USB 2, when it became available). The Creative ones used USB 1.1, which meant that a full sync took well over an hour, compared to 10-20 minutes for the iPod. Finally, the use of iTunes meant that the iPod had a database of all of the metadata as soon as the sync was finished, whereas the Creative ones had file/folder navigation and (I think - it's been over a decade since I used one) would eventually scan all of the ID3 tags to give tag-based navigation.
Not to question your memory, but the "IBM 8080 machine" sounds more like an Intel development system
Could be. I think I was 8 or 9 at the time, so my memory is pretty hazy. The company did quite a lot of RMX work, so it seems more likely that they'd have Intel systems than IBM ones.
Hmm, the wiki still lists it as a to-do feature. Does it support transparent handoff between clients (i.e. I start on my computer, finish on my phone and the other contact doesn't notice) and is there a mechanism for syncing message histories between multiple clients?
I suspect the business model that will emerge is short-term laptop rental places at airports. Take your documents along on an encrypted USB flash drive and attach them. Of course, the NSA will install spyware on all of the rental laptops, so they can get a good look at everyone's data.
Looking at the people I see in US airports, you could liposuction one of them and have space invisible to the scanners for a few kilos of explosive.
That's easy. Use a Chromebook and pick up a new one when you land. That way, all of your data is available on Google's servers for the US government to look at and decide whether they whether they want to let you into the country, before you even board the plane.
Let me guess: you pirated the games. This kind of logic was an early copy protection mechanism. When you bought them, you got a little pamphlet with hints and clues for the hardest puzzles.
More seriously, there are lots of reasons to have multiple GitHub accounts. There are quite a few people at Microsoft, for example, who have an account with MSFT in their name for open source work-related stuff and another account for private stuff. Additionally, GitHub uses a horrible ACL mechanism, rather than a simple capability mechanism, for authorising applications, which means that the easiest way of granting rights to monitor a repository to something like Travis-CI or Coverity or similar is to create a new account that has access only to that repository and create an OAuth token for that user. It's not surprising that the number would quadruple when there are lots of good reasons for people to have 2-3 accounts...
it seems highly unlikely he would then go after people as the author in jurisdictions that don't recognize the public domain
The author might not, but with the current duration of copyright, are you sure about their heirs? If you want what people intend when they say public domain, look at the Creative Commons Zero license, which exists specifically to address these problems.
Public domain is better than a freaking license
No it isn't. In some countries, public domain as a concept doesn't exist. In some others, public domain does exist, but things can't be explicitly assigned to the public domain and only end up there once copyright expires. In any of these jurisdictions, in the absence of a license the default remains that you have no rights. Additionally, if you simply place something in the public domain without a disclaimer of warranty, then you may find yourself liable for any of bugs in the code.
I'd just use a Tox client; it's like OpenVPN, but for messaging and most Tox clients do everything Skype does.
With one big and important exception: It doesn't yet handle multiple devices. Skype can be installed on your computer and your phone and used from either with the same set of contacts and with handoff between them.
It's obviously possible for the server to simply discard the sender part of the data when collecting it, but can you somehow ensure that the server never receives this, but does get information about traffic density and speed?
As long as the terms of the transaction are clear, there is nothing wrong with that
They never are. Even when, like Google, they're open about what they collect (as long as you bother to go and look), they're not open about the kind of inferences that they can run. For example, the Google Ads and Facebook tracking cookies let these companies know exactly which news articles you read online. If you use GMail or Facebook, they can infer which topics are important to you and likely to influence your vote. They can also infer which of the people in your social network are influenced by the opinions of other and which are the ones of influence. They can target ads to persuade the opinion formers that a particular political party or candidate cares about the issues that they care about. They can correlate this with your address to find which of you are in swing constituencies and which are undecided voters and target those more aggressively (Facebook will even sell this information: a list of undecided voters and the most important issues to them).
Do you think most consumers who use Google and Facebook think about this and say to themselves 'yes, that's totally fine, and definitely worth the service that I'm receiving?'
I enjoyed the Zork series when I was a child and my father said I should play this game and see the original. We found an old IBM 8080 machine in the back of a store room along with the OS and ADVENT on a pair of 8" floppy disks and played it on the terminal (the entire machine was a big blue box with the backplane and various circuit boards - we had to pull a couple apart to get the full set of working ones - another big blue box containing two 8" floppy disk drives, and a blue [you might spot a theme here. Big Blue was really into branding] terminal). The entire machine was bigger than I was back then.
A few years later I bought a Psion Series 3 (256KB of RAM, also used for persistent storage) and a 128KB flash SSD (a single cell, so you could write to it at arbitrary granularity, but erasing didn't free space and you had to back everything up, erase it, and restore the things you wanted). I bought Infozip (Infocom interpreter) and The Lost Treasures of Infocom to play on it. Most of the games fitted happily on the 128KB flash drive, with Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (a 150KB monster) being the one exception.
Infozip came with a port of ADVENT. I think that was the first time I'd really appreciated the rate of technological advance. The old IBM monster was less powerful than a machine that I carried around in my jacket pocket.
I'm not sure how applicable most of this is outside of the UK. In the UK, departments are ranked by the REF and previously by the RAE, which looks at roughly one 'output' (typically a publication) per year per academic. Publishing a lot of different things doesn't help you, publishing one thing in a top venue does. I'm not aware of any other country that uses a similar system.